Antidote to Juvenilized Faith

Christianity Today’s June edition features an article by Thomas Bergler that speaks to the content of his new book, The Juvenilization of American Christianity. He dares pose this question: When are American Christians going to grow up?

“We’re all adolescents now,” he writes of juvenilized Christianity, a form of faith he calls “self-centered, emotionally driven, and intellectually empty.”

Describing how he thinks we got into this condition, Bergler looks to the influence of youth-based ministries since World War II, the period that mirrors the years of my life. Fearful that young people might be wooed away from Jesus by a larger culture where there was serious moral decay, Christian leaders began to reform the traditional saving message of repentance and grace into one that emphasized inner peace, purpose, and general happiness—things more appealing to the adolescent mind. In other words: a gospel more aptly titled “What’s in it for me right now?”

Not only did the message morph, but its packaging took on new appearances. The words “entertainment” and “celebrity” come to mind. I hear Bergler suggesting that today’s forms of worship and preaching-content are influenced by this me-first orientation.

When I first saw Bergler’s term juvenilized, my mind jumped to Ezekiel 33:31, “My people come to you, as they usually do, and sit before you to listen to your words, but they do not put them into practice. With their mouths they express devotion, but their hearts are greedy for unjust gain. Indeed to them you are nothing more than one who sings love songs with a beautiful voice and plays an instrument well, for they hear your words but do not put them into practice.”

Bergler will probably take some heat for his remarks, but I, for one, applaud his courage in attempting to initiate a much-needed dialogue.

Perhaps Christianity Today’s editors anticipated some blow-back because they wisely invited responses to Bergler’s piece from several other Christian thinkers. I found everyone’s contribution quite helpful.

I’d like to raise one possibility that might have been neglected in the conversation on juvenilization.

Here it is. The juvenilization of American Christianity is the result of a way of believing that is not suffering-rated. Of course, American Christians die, lose jobs, and occasionally taste a little anti-faith bias. But try to tell Christians in other parts of the developing world that we know anything (anything!) about suffering unto death. Were they not so polite, they might laugh. Compared to the trials they face daily, most of us know only “flowery beds of ease.” And that affects the way we follow Jesus.

Original Christianity (the kind that produces mature faith) was a view of reality set in a suffering context. The Scriptures passed down to us were written by men who counted the cost of their obedience every day of their lives. Almost all of that founding generation died not in retirement communities, but in places of imprisonment or execution.

Their response to a toughened life? James: “Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials of many kinds because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature, complete, not lacking anything.” The American response to such an experience? “Get a lawyer.“

Come to think of it, that old faith is a hard one to sell in a 15-minute devotional. It would not produce the revenue a TV or radio preacher needs to stay lit up.

If I ever saw American Christians suffer together and deepen as a result, it happened when I was a child during World War II. Each Sunday evening, for example, our people crammed the sanctuary and sang songs about heaven and hope. They craved sermons that bolstered courage and assurance. The prayers were earnest and searching.

But the peak moment of such evenings came when we stood to hear the names of the many soldiers and sailors from our church who were deployed in Europe or the Pacific. This happened very week. Not infrequently we would hear the pastor call out one of those names, pause, and then finally say, “Petty Officer ____ was killed this week” or “Private _____ is missing in action.”

There followed the gasps, the loud weeping, an overpowering grief that captured everyone. People fell to their knees, clung to each other. This was no hour of entertainment. It was rather an expression of a rugged, desperate life together: a mutual reaching toward the everlasting arms and the promise of eternal life. We were all “adult” in this faith. We had to be. There was no other gospel.

When one who is wise reads Christian biography, he looks for men and women who have likely fulfilled their call in the midst of such suffering. We prefer people like Patrick, Francis, John Wesley, Amy Carmichael, and Jim Elliot. Why? Because they did what they did with their lives on the line. We don’t ask if they were authentic or “real” as we do of people who have not suffered for their calling. We know they were deep people because we learn of their faithfulness in the darkest hours.

Dietrich Bonheoffer: we can’t get enough of him because we know how he died. Only the professional theologians haggle about his theology. That’s their thing. The rest of us want to know how he handled himself under such pressure. Who would ask of Bonhoeffer, “Was his faith juvenilized?”

There is another German Christian, a contemporary of Bonhoeffer’s, whose name was Helmut von Moltke. Like Bonhoeffer, he also descended from a highly connected German family. Like Bonhoeffer, he lived in opposition to Hitler. Also like Bonheoffer, he was a martyr.

Moltke spent much of World War II in prison. In January 1945, he was hung by the Nazis, accused of being a part of the assignation plots against Hitler.

If you want a picture of the antithesis of juvenilization, read Moltke’s letters to his wife, Freya which he sent her almost daily from his prison cell. I cannot read his final letter, written within hours of his execution, without my eyes filling with tears.

These brief excerpts: “How merciful the Lord has been to me! Even at the risk of sounding hysterical: I am so full of gratitude that there is hardly room for anything else.”

Recalling the trial where he was condemned to die, he quotes the trial judge, Herr Freisler, as saying: “One thing Christianity and we (Nazis) have in common, and only one: we demand the whole man.” Moltke comments to Freya, “I wonder if (Freisler) realized what he was saying?”

Moltke goes on about his trial. “When I was called upon for my final statement I almost felt like saying: There is only one thing I want to mention in my defense:

And though they take our life, Goods, honor, children, wife, Yet is their profit small, These things shall vanish all, The city of God remaineth. (Luther)

Then Moltke begins the last page of his letter. As you read these lines, imagine what you would say if you knew you were writing your last words to someone you dearly love and with whom you had spent most of your life.

“Thanks also to yourself, my love, for your intercessions; thanks to all the others who prayed for us and for me. Your husband, your weak, cowardly, “complicated,” very average husband, was allowed to experience all this. If I were to be reprieved now—which under God is no more likely or unlikely than a week ago—I must say that I should have to find my way all over again, so tremendous was the demonstration of God’s presence and omnipotence.”

A paragraph or two later: “And now, dear heart, I come to you. I have not mentioned you anywhere, because you, my love, occupy a wholly different place from all the others. For you are not a means God employed to make me who I am, rather you are myself. You are my 13th chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians. Without this chapter no human being is human …”

And finally: “Dear heart, my life is finished and I can say of myself: He died in the fullness of years and of life’s experience. This doesn’t alter the fact that I would I gladly go on living and that I would gladly accompany you a bit further on this earth. But then I would need a new task from God. The task for which God made me is done …. I end by saying to you by virtue of the treasure that spoke from me and filled this humble earthen vessel:

“The Grace of our Lord Jesus Christ And the love of God and the fellowship Of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.”

A church that has not suffered does not produce a bumper crop of “Moltkes.” But should suffering come some day—and it will—you’ll see the rising of a whole new generation of Moltke-like saints: authentic, Christlike, brave. Grown up!

Gordon MacDonald is editor-at-large of Leadership Journal and chancellor of Denver Seminary. The Moltke letters are from Letters to Freya by Helmuth James von Moltke (Vintage Books, a division of Random House).