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Chapter Five: To the Christian (Part One)
I have spent the last two chapters speaking to non-Christians of all sorts, and telling them whatthe basic message of true Christianity has to say to them in particular. In these next two chapters, I willshift my focus to American Christendom, and show why the truth of the gospel matters for professingChristians, and what it has to say to them. So if you call yourself a Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant, liberal or conservative, fundamentalist, evangelical, or emergent, these chapters are for you.The truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which I laid out in chapter two, has something profound andimportant to say to you. That message of Christ and him crucified matters immensely. It is not just one part of what you claim to be as a Christian, it is your very life and breath, it is what defines you, it isyour heritage from eternity past and your destiny into eternity future, it holds forth everything you needfor this life and the life which is to come. But if you are a Christian in name only, then that whichshould bring eternal joy and glory will bring only eternal destruction and an unimaginablemultiplication of wrath on the day of judgment. It would be better to be an outspoken pagan than animpostor and hypocrite in the house of God.I must say from the beginning that professing Christendom and true Christendom are notcoterminous. In fact, there is a very wide discrepancy between the set of professing Christians and theset of genuine Christians in the world, and I suspect that this discrepancy is currently much greater inwestern Christendom than most people would imagine.People do, however, see that there is a discrepancy. They know that contemporary Christianityis not the religion of Jesus and his apostles, it is not the same truth that has compelled millions of followers of Christ to accept the loss of their prestige, property, and even their own lives with joy andforgiveness in their hearts – and they are reacting against this hypocrisy. It is no secret that westernChristianity is on the decline. The younger generation of Americans and Europeans are revolting
enmasse
against the Christianity of their parents. As a Christian, let me give you my opinion: this islargely a positive thing. True, those who react against Christianity will find no eternal joy in whatever alternative they embrace, whether it be another religion or secular materialism (which is itself sufficiently like a religion that it would be no misnomer to call it one). Still, it is a largely positive stateof affairs, simply because the massive empire of western Christianity is rotten to the core, and it mustfall. There is still a true Church in the west, and there will always be a true Church as long as Christ ison his throne. But that Church is currently obscured by the prominence of the much larger false churchof professing Christendom; and when the foundationless Christianity all around us topples, it will bemuch easier to see what real Christianity is actually like. And that will be a very important step in theright direction.A little later, I will speak specifically to professing Christians of different sorts; but first, let megive a quick overview of the current state of Christianity in America
1
.It takes no scholar to recognize that Christianity in the West is marked by nothing so much asdivision and sectarianism. It would be possible to divide the landscape of professing Christendom in athousand different ways; but for the purposes of this chapter, I think the best approach will be a simple,overarching classification of a few basic movements within modern western Christianity. Let medescribe in order, then, the following groups: Roman Catholics, liberal Protestants, fundamentalists,evangelicals in a broad sense, charismatics and pentecostals, emergents, and the confessionally
1The following overview is merely a general description of my own personal take on the state of Western Christendom,without the support or documentation which a formal critique would require. For a scholarly analysis of the largelycorrupt state of Christianity in America, I would direct the reader to David F. Wells,
The Courage to Be Protestant 
(Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdman's Publishing Co., 2008); and Michael Horton,
Christless Christianity
(Grand Rapids:Baker Books, 2008).
 
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reformed. After this, I will speak, not simply to representatives of these groups in particular, but to afew classifications of professing and genuine Christians that cut across these divides.
 Roman Catholics
The first group, that of Roman Catholics, is one of the easiest to describe, for it has remainedlargely unchanged and minutely self-defined for hundreds of years. I will not go into detail about itsdoctrines and beliefs, for they are readily available to anyone who wishes to do a little research.Instead, I will only give a little of the history of the Protestant Reformation and the centuries following.Over the course of many centuries, the medieval Roman church became exceedingly corrupt, both in doctrine and in practice. By the early sixteenth century, the message of the gospel was terriblyobscured, and abuses of power and ethical monstrosities were nearly universal. At that time, God raisedup a generation of reformers, including Martin Luther, Huldrich Zwingli, Philip Melancthon, JohnCalvin, John Knox, and many others, who determined to go back to the primary sources of the catholicfaith, and find again the gospel that had been lost. What they discovered, by God's Spirit, and went onto trumpet across the world, was a gospel of free and sufficient grace, founded upon the person andwork of Jesus Christ alone. They recognized no authority but the scriptures alone for their faith and practice, and they searched the scriptures diligently, and found in the scriptures that true Christianity proclaims free and eternal salvation to the person who simply believes in Christ alone. Salvation doesnot depend in any way on any kind of human works or merit, but is by God's grace alone, it is receivedthrough faith alone, which embraces Christ alone, who applies his own sufficient meritoriousobedience and personal righteousness to the sinner who comes to him in faith. The bible teaches thatChrist suffered God's wrath against the sins of everyone who would believe in him, and fully satisfiedthe curse of the immutable Law of God which they had transgressed. And if anyone would be saved, itcould only be on the basis of Christ's atoning blood and perfect righteousness, applied to the sinner'saccount in the legal act of justification.Instead of this biblical message of the gospel, the Roman church proclaimed a gospel that restedupon the combined merits of Christ, the so-called “supererogations” of the saints, and the condignmerit of each believer, who performs meritorious works in order to be assured of God's acceptance. Inthe midst of countless other doctrinal errors of sixteenth century Rome, the real heart of the problemwas this: they denied that Christ's own suffering in the place of sinners and the free gift, through faith,of his own perfect righteousness is fully sufficient for the salvation of any sinner. And in doing this,they refused to give all glory to God for his unconstrained gift of salvation, but ascribed glory to Mary,the saints, and themselves which ought to have been God's alone.In the centuries which followed, the Roman Church engaged in many movements of internal purification, reformed in many ways, and assumed a much great ethical and practical purity. But theone reformation they never underwent was the fundamental doctrinal reformation that the Protestantsembraced, on the testimony of the scriptures. Even today, they adhere steadfastly to the same blasphemous doctrines which rob God of his glory, even though the Reformers and Christians in their heritage down to the present day have demonstrated beyond any shadow of a doubt that the Romangospel is in direct opposition to the gospel proclaimed everywhere in the bible, which I endeavored tolay out in chapter two. So from the outset we must relegate the entirety of Roman Catholicism to theranks of false Christianity, because the doctrine upon which it is built is utterly contrary to the truegospel of Christ. Although Catholics still have their share of ethical corruption, as is evident in therecent scandals of molestation committed by certain priests, this is not their greatest problem (asshocking as it is), and the steps they have taken to rectify it are insufficient. Their most fundamental
 
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 problem is their doctrine, which is as brazen an assault against the glory of Christ as any other worldreligion has ever mounted.
Mainline Liberals
In the second place, we have in America a great many liberal Protestants, largely among themainline denominations. These Protestants have openly rejected the doctrines of the Reformation, andhave denied the gospel proclaimed in the scriptures. Near the beginning of the last century, during what became known as the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, many Protestant denominations chose tofollow the modernist and liberal social gospel of such theologians as Walter Rauschenbusch and HarryEmerson Fosdick. This gospel downplayed or outright denied the very heart of Christianity, which isthe substitutionary atonement of Christ for sinners, and strove to explain away every supernaturalelement of the bible as superstition which has no place in the modern, scientific era. In its stead, theliberal theologians emphasized the goodness and worth of humanity, and the need for social action and justice. Although the social activities in which they engaged were often commendable, yet inasmuch asthey had utterly cast away the gospel they likewise forfeited the name of true Christianity. Today, their ethics have largely been corrupted far beyond those of Roman Catholicism, and they openly embraceeverything from a practicing homosexual lifestyle, which the bible denounces as a sin against God'srighteous law, to abortion, which is the systematic murder of a particular class of humans, and thuscould rightly be labeled a sort of genocide. But even so, I will say the same thing about liberalProtestantism that I said about sixteenth-century Catholicism: its most fundamental problem is notethical or practical, it is rather doctrinal, entailing their denial of the gospel, and thus their refusal toglorify God. That is the one bitter root from which all sorts of sinful fruits have sprung.
 Fundamentalists
The next classification I mentioned is the fundamentalists, who basically came together as aninterdenominational group of conservative Christians who were opposed to the liberalism that was becoming more and more pronounced in the mainline denominations of their time, early in thetwentieth century. Although they accomplished some commendable things, and largely adhered to the biblical gospel, yet even from their inception as a movement they had some notable flaws which wouldlater prove to be the downfall of a great many of them. Foremost among these was the hermeneuticalsystem known as Dispensationalism, which is not always directly incompatible with the true gospel, but which distorts an understanding of the overarching biblical message to such a degree that the truegospel often becomes difficult to define and defend, and in some cases may be lost altogether. Also, therevivalism of evangelists such as Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday, which had a flawedunderstanding of the means of grace and the Spirit's role of sanctifying true believers, was detrimentalfrom the beginning – as was the commonly accepted Arminianism, a Reformation era spin-off of thesoteriology of John Calvin and the other major reformers, allowing for a much greater degree of humanability and contribution to the application of Christ's redemption. This, again, was not necessarilyincompatible with the true gospel but very often led to its complete and fundamental corruption.Also harmful from the beginning were the anti-intellectual flavor of much of the fundamentalistmovement, which led many of its adherents into sects formulated around charismatic, polarizingfigures who demanded blind, unthinking obedience; and the penchant for rallying around tangentialissues, as in the case of the temperance movement that was fueled largely by their own ranks, andwhich became so popular as to plunge the whole nation into the era of Prohibition. These things,although they were not necessarily incompatible with the gospel as were the doctrines of the Roman
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