What's After Young, Restless, and Reformed?
How about older, wiser, and merely Christian?
As a young Christian, I jumped wholeheartedly into a burgeoning theological movement, one which got young people excited about the Bible and Protestant theology, inspired us to devour books and attend church religiously, and provided us with guides and gurus to direct us in a confusing world: The young, restless, and Reformed.
After years of reading their blogs and books and watching videos, after a three-year seminary degree and a decade attending Reformed churches, it’s time to take stock. What should we think now of the young, restless, and Reformed movement?
Briefly, that while it taught us some good things, it is time to move further in, and further up. Youthful zeal, even with knowledge - and biblical knowledge, at that - must be transcended in order to attain wisdom, which only comes with experience and maturity.
What follows are four areas of critique of the young, restless, and Reformed movement - under the headings of theology, church, practice, and wisdom - and some pointers to a way forward.
1. Theology Revisited
While I studied Reformed theology at seminary and retain a commitment to it, the critiques of it are true.
Take for example the critique that we focused on Paul’s letters rather than the Gospels. I always resisted this critique; but following seminary, I really did have to shut the epistles and spend time in the gospels. I had to stop reading the Bible as a theology textbook, partly because I had already maxed out its potential in that direction. What I needed was spiritual and practical direction, not to mention a critique of the very theology-nerd mindset.
There were other theological critiques with which I began to resonate. People critiqued Reformed theology for being antinomian, concerned only with whether we are justified or elect, and not with the whole life lived. As I studied the Reformed tradition, I found that this was fundamentally incorrect about the sources - Calvin, Turretin, Baxter, Edwards.
But today’s Reformed pastors and churches? They were antinomian. They propagated a message of “Here’s what God’s law requires; but don’t worry, Jesus already did it.” They objected to the relevant passages of Calvin, of Turretin, and especially of Baxter and Edwards.
Most importantly, in practice, the theology-nerd obsession with the dictums of explicit theology led to a practical soteriology of “justification by profession of faith alone.” N. T. Wright had offered this critique, and while I hold that the traditional exegesis of Paul on justification is correct, the actual Reformed culture matched Wright’s critique. Our focus on explicit theological commitments implied that it was crying, “Lord, Lord,” - in just the right way - that saved.
The best of the Reformed tradition, I continue to believe, is neither narrow nor antinomian. But the popular American Reformed tradition is both.
2. The Church
Returning to the Gospels, I found in Christ’s teaching - mediated through regular conversations with
- a deep critique of the theology-nerd mindset. Who were the theology nerds, the theo-bros of Christ’s day? The Pharisees.We can believe all the details of Paul’s theology, and of Christ’s. But if we do it in the way of a Pharisee, we’re just, as King Laugh puts it, better Jews. (No offense to my Jewish readers!) What we need is a critique of religious hypocrisy and Pharisaism that applies to Christians.
In the Reformed culture, the temptation is to think that Jesus’ teaching about the Pharisees can be subsumed under the heading, “Those Darn Papists.” (Ahem, Catholics.) Once again, as if being on the right side of one theological divide were the key to salvation. Or again, as if properly saying that Jesus did it all and everything we do is worthless were the key - antinomian theology is not the key to salvation.
This critique of theology-nerds, however, applies equally to our churches. After all, for over a decade, I have been approaching church attendance as a matter of exemplifying one’s explicit theological commitments by where one attends one hour a week. I have tried to choose my church to exemplify where I’m at theologically.
But now I think it’s deeply incorrect to derive spiritual pride from one’s church attendance. I think it’s deeply misguided to think that where one attends one hour a week is the key to whether one is the “best kind of Christian.” I’m done sharing stories about my second conversion - to five-point Calvinism - and my supposed third conversion - to infant baptism. (Sorry, Presbyterians! We baptize babies ’cuz Constantine, not theology.)
We can’t think that churches and pastors, or doing church right, or getting the sermon message right will save the day. Action in the world both before and after the gospel is absolutely necessary.
3. Practice: The Fourth Evangelical Wave
Trevin Wax recently wrote that we are entering a fourth evangelical wave after the third wave of gospel-centered (see my recent critique), i.e., young, restless, and Reformed. (The first wave was the charismatic movement, the second the seeker-sensitive movement.)
The fourth wave is about Christian practice, habits, and virtues. John Mark Comer’s re-popularization of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and “the way of Jesus” is the spearhead. Comer is recommending a raft of spiritual disciplines and meditation as shaping our Christian lives more than theological details (to which he is not opposed).
You could read my emphases and those of King Laugh as contributing to this fourth wave. However, I want to massage the details. After all, I fear that a focus on spiritual disciplines as “the ticket” can be just a privatized version of the same ritualism into which Reformed practice has fallen. (Instead of attendance at gospel-centered expositional sermons being key, it’s morning devotions.)
I’m less interested in disciplines, rituals, liturgy, and habits than Comer and, for that matter, Jamie Smith. What I’m interested in post-YRR are wisdom, growth, and maturity. I think habits and liturgy sometimes are a kind of place-holder for that, both for good and ill. Comer’s new “way of Jesus” seems to have its own rituals, but rightly understood the focus on practice is correct. Russell Moore talked recently about being a “practicing Christian.” I think that would be the thing to emphasize.
Implicit Theology
While I retain Reformed theology, I am much less concerned about our explicit theology, and much more about our implicit theology exemplified in practice. You can be explicitly reformed, for example, but functionally Pelagian. You can be explicitly justification-only, but functionally prosperity gospel.
Implicit theology is revealed in actions and concrete judgments, not explicit theologizing. The gospel-centered movement’s response to celibate, gay Christians revealed their functional theology as a myopic focus on being a white-washed Christian, while suppressing the finer details of our unnatural nature. In a more pointy-headed way, the Federal Vision controversy revealed the implicit theology of NAPARC (Old-school Reformed and Presbyterian) churches as functional antinomianism. And every week, our church practice and sermon structure reveals our belief that listening to theology lectures will save us osmotically and sacerdotally.
Theological Triage
Once you reorient around Christian practice, most theological distinctions pale in comparison. Now, I learned the idea of theological triage - ranking doctrines by their significance - from this movement, from Al Mohler, specifically. But we actually have to practice it. For example, if you think that being Baptist is what matters you’re not practicing it. If you think that being Presbyterian is a third conversion (and Federal Vision a fourth!), you are not practicing it. With these things in perspective, the differences between Protestants and Catholics pale, so no intra-Protestant distinctions stand out as much.
In that light, the book The Imitation of Christ stands out as a post-theology-nerd manifesto.
4. Wisdom
In reorienting around Christian practice, we need a new type of knowledge. The knowledge of the theology-nerd does not suffice for healthy Christian practice. Nothing that can be embraced by a 17-year-old and mastered by a 25-year-old can be sufficient teaching for Christ’s church.
Instead, we need wisdom.
There is no shortcut or brand that will do the job. We don’t need new “practicing Christian” t-shirts or bumper stickers. We need actual virtue, wisdom, and maturity. These are hard won and require inter-generational teaching, decades of experience, and trial and error.
Churches who sought to contribute to this, rather than to disseminating seminary knowledge, would also look different. They would teach meat, and not just milk. But given a paucity of such churches, (churches, in order to address a wide audience, usually focus on milk) we must not be afraid to look outside the church for meat.
We must resist the guru. If I have a guru, he is, or was, Jordan Peterson. But the rise of Jordan Peterson only revealed the poverty of our evangelical gurus. They had left gaps - the entire realms of wisdom and psychology - which Jordan Peterson swooped in to fill. But ultimately, we don’t just need to “find us a new guru” to fill those gaps - we need to seek wisdom in those areas. (Take Chris Williamson as the non-Christian example of trying to find “modern wisdom” with Peterson as a launching point but not an endpoint.)
I have captured this epistemological change as “Christian empiricism”: Knowledge from experience. We must recognize the necessity of knowledge from experience. This is part of moving on from young and restless to older and wiser. For it is also possible to become older, but none the wiser.
Am I Still Young, Restless, and Reformed?
Am I still young, restless, and Reformed? In many ways, yes. But I’m no longer quite so young, my restlessness now has a different cause, and I care less about being explicitly Reformed and more about being implicitly Reformed.
I don’t offer a new way, or a new ideology. If I could point somewhere, it would be to the words of Christ, who never wrote a systematic theology, who if he ever spoke the gospel, tried to keep it hidden, but who truly lived the gospel. His teaching was about a way of life that would distinguish his followers from the world, as well as from doctrinaire religious authorities and practitioners.
A Reformed children’s book my wife and I own reads thus: “Jesus Wins! He is our eXample.” (It’s an alphabet book.) “But more importantly, he is the Yes and Amen to all of God’s promises.”
It is the “But more importantly” that gets me. I no longer read that phrase aloud. For it creates a false dichotomy. Nothing is more important - for us - than that we imitate Christ.
And in that point, we Reformed are not at all distinct from any other variety of Christian. We do not have a corner on the gospel. In fact, being Reformed and gospel-centered theology are often nothing but a hindrance. They make us think that the secret things of Lord - whether we are justified or elect - are within our province. But they aren’t. We should treat predestination as the secret knowledge it is. It hardly concerns us.
The one thing we can do is to live in accord with Christ’s new commandment to love others, as only he loved us. By that, they will know that we are his disciples. And it is in choosing and living, by our free will, to imitate him that we have been, are being, and will be saved.
Very well said! This is important stuff. And it maps very closely with my experience/critique, though besides attending RTS, I haven’t been as deep in the Reformed world (Episcopalian) as you.
It was a few years ago now when I “deconstructed” my evangelical faith. I will save the moniker “exvangelical” to describe others but my dig was at least as deep and provided for a different destination. I am still a Christian, believing scripture is instructive and godly, though never signing on to the Reformed point of view. I continue to worship and serve in the church body which I was led to in 1975. I do however put some distance between me and what passes for the Church of Evangelicalism. There are too many things going which can be described as fleshly. I sit still and let others pursue them, hoping that my example will speak.