The more you agree with someone, the more interesting your disagreements with that person become. Your disagreements are no longer so broad and sweeping that they barely scratch the surface; instead, they are about the innermost nuts and bolts which make the whole thing work.
As a rule, I tend to agree on most things with David French, the lawyer/journalist who writes and podcasts for The Dispatch. His take on constitutional law is close enough to my own Nat Hentoff-inspired strict constructionism that most of the time I can't tell the difference, and I certainly appreciate his membership in the Presbyterian Church in America. But while I'm sure he's a faithful Church member, I suspect (unlike me) he is more evangelical than presbyterian in his sensibilities. This came out in his most recent Sunday edition of The French Press.
Consider his use of Kierkegaard's Attack on Christendom, from which this newsletter's title ("How American Christendom Weakens American Christianity") is drawn. French summarizes Kierkegaard's
Think of the distinctions roughly like this—Christianity is the faith, Christians are believers in the faith, and Christendom is the collective culture and institutions (universities, ministries) of the faith.
Did you notice the missing institution?
French then quotes Matt McManus's summary of Kierkegaard's argument: "In many ways, it was far better to see Christendom shrunk down to a few genuine believers than to see it ballooned and enforced into a parody of itself."
Like David French, I haven't read much Kierkegaard since college, and I do not want to treat the entirety of his philosophy dismissively. Nonetheless, ever since college I've found this aspect of Kierkegaard's thought rather adolescent. It seems to assume Christianity can exist outside of an institutional structure. This is both naïve and impossible.
To put the matter simply: how will Christians learn the faith? How will persons learn about the faith in order to become Christians in the first place? The obvious answer is through teachers, evangelists and preachers. But these do not arise of themselves, unbidden. Common sense and bitter experience have taught all of us not to rely on anyone who credentials himself: authority to teach and preach must be legitimized by others. As soon as we bring in legitimation, authority and credentialing, we must have an institution.
To put the matter still more simply: you can't have the faith without an institution to inculcate and propagate it.
French begins with Kierkegaard in order to develop his thesis that the institutions of evangelical Christendom are at odds with Christianity. This is a profoundly true insight; as he writes, "the institutions of Christendom should model the way of the cross if they’re going to preach the way of the cross." Instead, they focus on their own survival even if that survival means crushing reeds and smoldering wicks; the institutions continue even though they can no longer sincerely fulfill the ministry they allegedly exist to carry out.
(French points to Ravi Zacharias Ministries and Camp Kanakuk, but I can't help but think of the Boy Scouts of America. While it's not a Christian organization, it the perfect example of an institution which has abandoned, by admitting girls, the very constituency [boys] which it was formed to serve. Apparently, it's more important for the Boy Scouts of America to continue than for a scouting program for boys to continue.)
By pointing to the way of the Cross, French suggests it would be better for some parachurch ministries to die than to continue as a symbol of Spiritual, physical or sexual abuse. Here again, I cannot agree with David French more. In fact, I'm content to see all the institutions of evangelical Christendom wither away and/or die. That's also where French seems to end up:
As Kierkegaard reminds us, it’s an old crisis. There are times when the great enemy of Christianity is Christendom itself. But Christendom isn’t Christianity. Indeed, the collapse of the institutions of Christendom does not mean the collapse of Christianity. And their collapse may be necessary for people to see through doctrine, through celebrity, and through politics to catch at last a glimpse of the man who is the faith, the man who carried a cross and now commands us to do the same.
To which I can only respond, "How then shall they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in Him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent?" (Romans 10:14-15) I think David French has forgotten about the institution Christ founded to send preachers.
The problem with American evangelical Christendom is that, with all its ministries bearing the names of their charismatic founders, it is not centered on the one Biblical ministry: the Church. The Church is not one amongst many ministries. She alone is the household of faith and the Kingdom of Christ in this world. And "the Church" is not another generic label for "Christians" or even "Christian ministries." Because the Church has officers and members (Hebrews 13:7, 17), the Church is an institution.
Yes, the time has come for evangelical Christendom to go the way of the Cross. In its place, Christians need to return to the Church so that they can hear of the man and God who is the faith.
