Dear friends, 

I came across a book review this week that laments: 

Many theologians are introducing revisions into the classical doctrine of God. This revisionist work is occurring not only among mainline theologians but among evangelical and even Reformed theologians as well.

Review of James Dolezal, All That Is In God by Keith Mathison

In summary Mathison argues 

“The contemporary departures from classical Christian theism are no minor matter. These doctrines are influencing the next generation of pastors who will, in turn, fill the pulpits of the church. This is why it is important that those in the pews of these churches be aware of what is going on and be able to recognize departures from historical biblical orthodoxy when they see it. If one does not understand the biblical grounds for the classical doctrine, the arguments made by the revisionists can seem plausible and persuasive. Take the time to learn why these doctrines have been the heritage of the church for thousands of years. 

Keith Mathison

To be honest that’s about all of the review I really understood. The pros and cons of theistic mutalism, impassiblity, and divine simplicity which each get a chapter in Dolezal’s book seem beyond most things I have studied in three theology degrees, and not common dinner table discussions here in the UK. We’ll come back to why that may be in the next chapter. 

But the conclusion is a familiar theme to me. A generational slide. 

A large chunk of my thesis has been on a generational shift in doctrine. 

Feeding the Beast

It became interesting to me when I met with Sandy Millar in 2017. He’d kindly invited me out to Suffolk to discuss both my writing and a parish weekend he was going to take for Christ Church W4. We got to talking about Alpha and the HTB network.  He gave me a well rehearsed line, which I later found out was also quoted by Monica Furlong, in her 2000 book The CofE: The State it is In, p.274. 

The line was: ‘we need to change the model not the message’. 

In Furlong’s book Millar elaborates:

‘the trouble with the Church of England is that as the market is distancing itself from us we have been forced to change either the message or the model’. 

Sandy Millar

Millar states that changing the message is a ‘total failure’ as the market hopes to hear that the church ‘actually does believe in something’. Rather it is the model that needs changing, to connect with the young.’

It sounds so simple. Change the packaging. Enhance production values. Boost the presentation. Keep the age old message the same. And Sandy has been brilliant at communicating it. 

But a lingering question remained as I heard this: Is it possible to change the model without changing the message? Which parts of the message get accentuated in the changed model? Do any parts get dropped? 

A further question I reflected on years later is about ‘the market’. 

Is the market something neutral? Do Christians simply need to discern market demand and then supply a felt need? If the need is purpose, supply a ‘life worth living now’. If the need is connection, supply a ‘relationship with Jesus’. If the need is spirituality, supply a tangible ‘encounter with the Holy Spirit’ in a contained course setting. 

But what if it’s not simply neutral? Could ‘giving the market what it wants’ feed a consumerist beast? What if that beast then outgrows its cage if it has too much to feast on? 

What if the beast doesn’t want to hear the whole counsel of God? Would the model have changed the message then? 

Mind the Gap

The reality is that presenting the gospel in a more attractive, winsome and even edited way doesn’t necessarily change the message. Not the message you think you believe anyway. 

My thesis explores the emerging gap between what we think we believe, what we say we believe in public and what an outsider could discern we believe by watching us and listening to us. 

What we believe is the normative theology – the key sources texts, influences and doctrines we hold dear. The ‘hill we would die on’ in years gone by. This can stay the same even if you edit what you say in public.

What we say we believe is espoused theology. It differs from normative theology if we don’t teach our core beliefs systemically or we let other ideas come in and take up air time / head space. 

What others can discern is operant theology – our theology in practice, which can be syncretised with any cultural winds and waves that surround us. 

So our message can be exactly the same as it was in our normative theology. Our core beliefs. The books, teachers, authors, creeds and source texts we turn to. But if you listened to us and / or observed us it might have changed a whole lot. 

There is a sign on the back of the London Red Buses at the moment. It’s for careful driving. It says ‘Watch Your Speed Your Son Does’. 

The advertisers know that I might have a normative theology of driving that says, ‘20 miles an hour in an urban setting is sensible road safety.’ I may have an espoused theology of driving that says to my son ‘slow down for speed bumps and crossings’. But if I have an operant theology of driving where I excuse myself for speeding generally, my son is going to pick up my habits and excuses not my unspoken and undemonstrated beliefs. 

Changing the model (and the message) has led to an increasing gap between normative, espoused and operant theologies in many of our charismatic churches. This happens when there is little/no attempt to pass on the normative theology. When normative theology is taken for granted, not contended for.

And that means the next generation starts from a new place. 

They start from what they have seen and heard. 

They start from the marketing. 

The lost message? 

In my thesis I explore three ancestors of the UK charismatic Anglican scene. Three people/eras with whom you might expect us to share DNA if you know our history. 

  • Closest up: John Wimber
  • Further back: A surprise entry for some – John Stott. 
  • Historical Mirror: John Wesley and George Whitefield. 

Wimber

We’ll explore Wimber’s impact in later chapters but for now I want to zoom in on his theology. 

Don Williams, a theologian operating within the Vineyard movement, gives a useful summary. He sees Wimber not as a modernist and therefore not a fundamentalist either and that he was more like a pre-modernist than a postmodern. Hence, he was at home in the age that dominated the church and the West before the Enlightenment, inspired by the likes of the miracle performing St Cuthbert. This meant he was able to position the ‘Vineyard’ to bring a spiritual reality to the ‘emerging antimodern ethos of the emerging postmodern age’.

For Williams, Vineyard under Wimber was strongly evangelical theologically, but ‘surprisingly open’, and influenced particularly by five movements in history. 

The Vineyard Statement of Faith draws on these five movements spanning church history: 1) the Patristic Period – which gives it a Trinitarian orthodoxy; 2) the Reformation – underlining the sufficiency of Christ alone, and the final authority for the written Word of God ‘separating the Vineyard from neoorthodoxy and liberal evangelicalism’; 3) the Eighteenth-Century Great Awakening – emphasizing new birth, conversion, regeneration and a life of holiness ‘personal sanctification’; 4) the modern missionary movement – driving back the kingdom of Satan by evangelization; 5) the biblical theology movement – essentially George Ladd’s Kingdom Theology that was taught at Fuller Seminary.

(For more on Wimber read: When Wimber met HTB and following posts).

John Stott

In my thesis I argue that John Stott is the ‘forgotten father’ to HTB providing the foundations for its orthodox growth in the 1980s and 1990s. John Collins would often say “All my theology is Stott’s”, with a wistful, but still loyal, lament at the unwanted gap that developed between him and his mentor from 1963 over the charismatic movement.

As Edwards put it, John Stott:

 ‘consistently taught a religion which claims to be true and not merely enjoyable or useful; which asks people to think, not merely to tremble or glow; which bases itself on a book which can be argued about, not on experience which convinces only the individual who has had it’

Edwards, “Power of the Gospel,” in David L. Edwards and John Stott, Evangelical Essentials (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1989), 16. 

Traditionally evangelicals in the Church of England were quite easy to spot. According to David Bebbington they were marked by four operant, espoused and normative distinctives which Timothy Dudley Smith says Stott epitomised. 

People of the cross – ‘crucicentric’ – who saw the cross as the centre of their faith. 

People of the bible – ‘biblicist’ – who saw the bible as living, powerful and sharper than a double edged sword.

People of conversion – ‘conversionist’ – who emphasised the need to be born again, die to sin and be transformed. 

People of activity – ‘activist’ – who were inspired by stories such as the speech of condemned criminal Charles Peace who was escorted on the gallows by a prison chaplain reading about the fires of hell. Peace burst out

“Sir, if I believed what you and the church of God say that you believe, even if England were covered with broken glass from coast to coast, I would walk over it, if need be, on hands and knees and think it worthwhile living, just to save one soul from an eternal hell like that!”

Ravenhill, Leonard (1987) [1959]. Why Revival Tarries. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publisher. pp. 33–34

Evangelicals were those with bloodied knees. 

But none of these are very easy to market. 

But that is our heritage. 

Read more on Stott: Forgotten Father to HTB

Wesley and Whitefield 

Finally for a historical mirror I bring together two men that have often been pitted against each by their followers (and at times by themselves), but who had a core ‘teleology’ in common. 

In essence I argue their message was ‘a holy people for a holy God.’ 

A key dividing point between them was the extent to which holiness can be achieved in this life. But consider their similarity on the theme: 

John Wesley believed that Charles and he had been called to propogate Christian holiness:‘holiness was our point – inward and outward holiness’. Again with great clarity he wrote to one of his preachers: ‘Full sanctification is the grand depositum which God has lodged with the people called Methodists; and for the sake of propogating this chiefly he appears to have raised us up.’

Whitefield is well known for taking issue with Wesley’s doctrine of Perfect Love. Yet despite the significant differences in early Methodism a clear discipleship goal of holiness was at the fore for both in their teaching and personal motivation. Whitefield and Wesley were preparing holy people for a holy God to live in a holy eternity. Whitefield argued fervently that to be a Christian is “to be holy as Christ is holy” and that “Jesus Christ came down to save us, not only from the guilt, but also from the power of sin.”

He himself confessed sin had no dominion over him, although he felt “the struggles of indwelling sin day by day.” He even proclaimed that a mark of receiving the Holy Ghost is, “Not committing sin . . . This expression does not imply the impossibility of a Christian’s sinning … It only means thus much; that a man who is really born again of God doth not willfully commit sin, much less believe in the habitual practice of it.”

Read more: Wesley and Whitefield: What they believed and why

Consider also their key doctrines: 

Wesley’s have been helpfully summarised as follows: i) Scripture as ‘the only standard of truth’ ; ii) Salvation by faith as ‘the standing topic’  iii) sin as ‘loathsome leprosy’ ; iv) the regeneration through the Spirit by which we may be ‘properly said to live’ ; v) assurance as ‘an inward impression on the soul’ ; vi) holiness, ‘the grand depositum’ ; vii) a desire to ‘flee from the wrath to come’ as the ‘one condition’ required of those wanting admission to the societies.

In an alternative scheme Outler picks just three: i) original sin, ii) justification by faith alone and iii) holiness of heart in those who have been born again.

Whitefield’s focus was similar: ‘the big truths of the Book of Truth,’summarised by Maddock as ‘original sin, justification by faith and the new birth’ (although he notes the ‘subtle but highly significant theological differences’ and hence pastoral applications, that flow from Wesley and Whitefield’s varying usage of identical terms). 

Read more: Wesley and Whitefield: What they believed and why

Have we changed the model and the message? 

Every generation needs to ‘proclaim afresh’ the good news. But when does marketing the gospel change the message? Or is the issue not so much marketing but a pendulum swing – a reaction to the former things – such as we often see in the church. 

 Many Anglican evangelicals touched by renewal in the 1960s onwards had lived with a legacy of teaching on holiness that was austere. It was often marked more by enforced abstinence from external markers deemed to be sinful (dancing, make-up, theatre, ornamentation) than by joy and victory. Once they experienced renewal they were keen to avoid anything that seemed like a return to legalism after their own personal charismatic encounters. In the interviews a key HTB insider described what he saw as a common HTB metaphor for this change, as quoted in Chapter One:

Imagine carrying a backpack called Law for many years, then taking it off, eating the heavy food inside it and finding that what had been a burden on your back sustains you when eaten inside you.

As he describes it this led HTB increasingly to believe that it was the Spirit who changed behaviour, and gradually led to less ethical teaching about specific types of prohibited behaviour:

It became clear that we saw the Holy Spirit working in people’s lives to change people from the inside rather than say ‘you’ve got to live like this’. And so, there’s been a subtle shift over time where [HTB] will still say ‘this is the way to live’ but there won’t be that ‘stop doing this, stop doing that’. Just much more ‘follow the Spirit and let Him convict you’.

In other words, stop teaching the hard stuff – the Holy Spirit will remind you of that when you need it. Preach the positives. 

It’s not hard to see how that colludes with marketing the message. 

And shifts the message. 

And how over a generation or two the message shifts. 

Because the only thing you can be ‘reminded’ of is something you have been taught. 

Evangelical-ish

My hot-take on Bebbington’s Quadrilateral is that only one of these four points is still seen in much of the contemporary charismatic church. 

Crucicentric has been replaced with a (therapeutic) experience of the Spirit. 

Biblicist has been put through the prism of positivity so much that the bible becomes a self-help manual (where referred to). 

Conversionist has been subbed off the pitch and replaced with ‘a relationship with Jesus’ which in a swipe left/swipe right era means little more than ‘until it’s no longer working for me’.

Activist remains, although post-covid there’s a notable upturn in what Catherine Tate called ‘Am I bovvered’. The biggest call is comfort.  

Of course there are many who celebrate the change in the message. Looking for a connecting conversation with the century we live in, they are happy to palletise the prose, to dilute the doctrine, to preach the positives.

But others have ended up here accidentally. The idea that we preach a different gospel to Wesley, Whitefield, Stott or Wimber (wherever you want to place the mirror) is a wake up call.

But we don’t have to remain tame evangelical-ish… we can look to the rock from which we were hewn and really think… 

THINK!

If we have accidentally, unwittingly changed the message. If a gap has emerged between what we think we believe, say we believe and seem to believe. If a generational shift has occurred because we’ve only passed on what we (mistakenly) believed were the ‘positives’. If we have self-edited ourselves and the gospel. If, as we will explore in the next chapter, we have become ‘caged birds’ we have to think… 

Is it too late to look to the rock from which we were hewn… 

Or can we reconnect with our roots?

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Next week: Caged Birds: Preaching the Positives and Self-Editing the Gospel

Want to read more?

Previous Posts in this series: Foreword | introduction | Remember The Baby | The Bathwater Needs Flushing | Driven to Distraction by Success | Whoever Pays the Piper

HTB Network Thesis in 30 Parts: Featuring: Origins | Renewal | Success Culture | Managerialism | Theology | Trajectories.