Fortress Mentality

The church in America has been put in a cage by its acceptance of the dichotomy, the view that reality is split into two spheres of sacred and secular. This is a cage of our own making. Like Michael Goheen writes, "The barred cage that forms the prison for the gospel in contemporary western culture is [the Church's] accommodation... to the fact-value dichotomy" (quoted by Nancy Pearcey in Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity).

The fact of the matter is that we like it this way. It provides us with an illusion of safety. One way it does this, I believe, is that the dichotomy is one of the primary reasons (but not the only reason) that the persecution of the Christian Church isn't as severe in western society as it is in other parts of the world. Another way is that it convinces us that we are effectively combating worldliness.

The dichotomy has provided the opportunity for the Christian Church to grow in a relatively hostile environment without much interference. But this has come at a cost, a cost to the Gospel. The Gospel has been severely sidelined and thought irrelevant by our society. The church adds converts to its numbers but its influence in the culture continues to dwindle. The Gospel has no impact on our society because it has been put in a cage and the church is responsible for putting it there.

I call this the fortress mentality. The fortress mentality is the primary way in which the evangelical church in America has accommodated the world spirit and compromised the gospel. In John 17:13-19 Jesus prayed that his church would be in the world but not of it. Unfortunately, we are all to often of the world but not in it.

I want to give you four characteristics of the fortress mentality. I borrowed these points from a lecture given by Professor Jerram Barrs at Covenant Theological Seminary on the culture wars and adapted them for my purposes (I highly recommend you read the transcript of this lecture or download the mp3 audio). Any inconsistencies or errors in relating his points to my topic that you may find are all mine and not those of Professor Barrs.

The church's accommodation of the dichotomy has created a fortress mentality in the church that has these four resulting characteristics:

1. We are afraid and intimidated by the culture.


2. We condemn the world around us.


3. We retreat from the world into the haven of the church.


4. We personally separate from unbelievers to keep ourselves pure.
   

You may look at those things and say "I am concerned about the culture and that seems like the right coarse of action. It looks like the safest way to act." This is an illusion and it will not work. It actually works against the gospel. Let me give you five reasons why this is so.

First, even though it may look like we are keeping ourselves protected from worldliness, in reality the fortress mentality is a deceptive form of worldliness. We are buying into a worse form of corruption then what we thought we were trying to avoid.

Second, the church ends up being cut off and vulnerable like the German forces after the D-Day invasion. The Germans retreated into different towns and villages and fortified their positions, ready for a siege. The siege never came. The Allies were instructed to bypass those positions. They were happy to leave the Germans sitting in their fortresses untouched. Within three months most of these Germans had surrendered. Why? Because they were cut off and vulnerable. The Allies controlled the landscape.

When the church has a fortress mentality it retreats from the culture and gives up control of the cultural landscape to the enemy. We may feel safe inside our fortress because there is no persecution but the world knows it doesn't have to lay siege to us. All they have to do is keep us in the fortress so that we become more and more irrelevant and soon we will just give up. The World likes it when we stay in our fortress. They have the run of the place without our interference.

Third, we start looking at everything outside the walls of our "sacred fortress" as hostile and evil. We become afraid of the world seeing everything in it as something to avoid because of how it might potentially corrupt us. The problem with this is that we will end up being disobedient to passages such as 1 Timothy 4:4-5 and reject God's good creation.

Forth, evangelism becomes a raid into enemy territory where we try to take captives back to the safety of our fortress. The non-believer is looked at as the enemy. We very rarely know any non-believers personally and we pride ourselves on this fact. This sort of view limits evangelism to methods like door-to-door, street preaching, and other confrontational styles of sharing the gospel.

Fifth, our view of ministry and spirituality suffers from the dichotomy. Sacred/secular as it is viewed in relation to the ministry is clergy/laity. We are told from good preachers that all believers are in the ministry. Unfortunately, this is nothing but lip service. We don't know how to be involved in the ministry and we have never been told. The only thing we have come up with is to support our minister's ministry by throwing money at it. The reason this is is because we see the ministry as something that the pastor or the missionary does. The ministry belongs to the sphere of the clergy and we as laity can only be involved in a supportive role.

The sacred/secular split also affects our spirituality. Since in this view the sacred is the sphere of the spiritual and the secular is the sphere of the worldly and profane, we try to limit ourselves to the sphere of the sacred as much as possible. Whenever we are involved in the secular sphere we look at it as something we can't avoid and have to put up with; we see it as something of no value and we are counting the minutes until we can get back to the sphere that really matters. We desire to escape the mundane. If the spiritual resides in the sacred sphere then let us escape from the secular totally.

This view of spirituality has two outcomes: legalism and charismatic ecstaticism. Legalism is rampant and the charismatic movement is one of the fastest growing areas in the American church today. The fortress mentality is the fuel that feeds this fire.

The fortress mentality has many destructive effects. We as the church need to abandon this worldly perspective and correct our vision with the Scriptures. The fortress mentality is no protection that we can trust. I know of only one fortress that we can take refuge in, this is not it.

A mighty fortress is our GOD!

The Spirit of the Age

What worldview are you operating off of? If you are a Christian you might tell me that you operate off of a Christian worldview. Maybe you do and maybe you don't. Just because you are a Christian doesn't mean that you are acting in accordance with your professed beliefs.

Postmodernism, to use an expression of Francis Schaeffer, is like a bad London Fog. It seeps in through the cracks and permeates everything.

The point is is that you could be more postmodern in your beliefs than you are aware of. Unless we become aware of our tendencies to think in the wrong way we will never correct our thinking. This is why I spelled out a lot of this in one of my previous post, Postmodern "Split". You might be asking, "How important is this, really?"

Francis Schaeffer, in his book The God Who Is There, said:

The Christian is to resist the spirit of the world. But when we say this, we must understand that the world-spirit does not always take the same form. So the Christian must resist the spirit of the world in the form it takes in his own generation. If he does not do this, he is not resisting the spirit of the world at all. This is especially so for our generation, as the forces at work against us are of such a total nature.

He then quotes these words attributed to Martin Luther:

If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at that moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved, and to be steady on all the battlefield besides, is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.

Postmodernism is the spirit of the age that we face in our generation. The problem is that even in the most biblical and theologically accurate churches an accommodation to this world-spirit has occured. Although most of them probably are not aware of this and think that they are standing strong against the spirit of the age. The reason this is is that they have a precommitment already in place to the dichotomy, splitting reality into two different spheres.

This is a serious issue. As Nancy Pearcey writes in her book Total Truth: Liberating Christianity from Its Cultural Captivity (Study Guide Edition) "This dichotomy in our minds is the greates barrier to liberating the power of the gospel across the whole of culture today... it is the single most potent weopon for delegitimizing the biblical perspective in the public square today."

Because we already start from a two realm view of reality we have a hard time seeing where we are at fault. We easily slip into accepting the worlds perspective of things without ever realizing that we are doing so. We stand strong on our confession of faith, while at the same time compartmentalizing that faith. We defend the truthfullness of the Bible and then limit its application to only the "religious" area of life. Without being aware of it, we put God in a box.

Postmodern "Split"

The way our culture thinks and sees the world affects everyone in our culture, including you and me. The way we start to correct our thinking is to first become aware that we do think the way our culture does and to realize that it is wrong. This is the part where you buckle your seat belts because in the past when I have pointed out to people where there thinking is wrong I've gotten a mixed bag of reactions, anger and hostility being one of my least favorites. We'll explore this over the next few post.

We live in the postmodern era because our cultures thinking is postmodern. Within the postmodern cultural landscape there is a wide and varied range of beliefs. This is referred to as pluralism (our generations own version of polytheism). In such a diverse environment of beliefs what is it that unifies these beliefs under the heading postmodernism? What exactly is postmodernism?

Postmodernism is complex, to be sure, but its basic principle is pretty simple. Postmodernism's starting point is a dichotomy. It splits reality into two separate spheres. This was inherited from Greek philosophy. This "split" can be traced down through the history of the church and western civilization. You could diagram it like this...

Plato: Form/Matter = Perfect/Imperfect
Gnosticism: Spirit/Body = Good/Evil
Thomas Aquinas: Grace/Nature = Supernatural add on/Built in goal or purpose
Emanuel Kant: Freedom/Nature = Man has meaning/Man is a machine
Postmodernism: Sacred/Secular, Value/Fact, Faith/Reason = Non-rational/Rational
Note: Look at the "/" symbol as meaning "verses" or "opposite of" or maybe even "in opposition too".

In the past philosophers and theologians tried unsuccessfully to reconcile the tension created by this "split" through reason. These men truly believed that there was a rational answer to the tension. Postmodernism's solution to the tension wasn't to reconcile them or bring them together but to separate them even further.

Classic philosophy viewed the world in terms of true and false (antithesis). That is, they believed that if one thing was true then its opposite was false. This formed the basics of logic and reason. For example, the law of non-contradiction says that something can not be A and Non-A at the same time and in the same relationship. (God can't both exist and not exist.)

Francis Schaeffer in his book Escape from Reason said that since the time of the Greeks until Hegel philosophy had three characteristics. The first was what he called rationalism, they believed that man had the ability to come to know truth all on his own without any outside help. The second was rationality, that is they believed reason was the proper tool to be used to come to the truth. The third was hope because these men believed that there was truth out there and their questions would be answered.

Postmodernism has given up hope of ever coming to the answers by reason. There is no absolute truth. Therefore, reason can't bring us to the answer. The only characteristic that postmodernism retains is rationalism, man is still viewed as the autonomous determiner of what is true.

Postmodernism no longer views things in terms of antithesis but rather they believe that what was looked at before as being true and its opposite false can be brought together to form a new "truth". The result being all things are relative. This new truth is not arrived at by reason (since that was rejected in rejecting antithesis) but by a "leap of faith".

The "leap of faith" is the hallmark of postmodernism. It attempts to solve the problem of the "split" by this "leap of faith". Postmodernism doesn't believe that there are rational answers to be found, no absolute truth to provide meaning to life. Instead, we are to jump to the conclusion that life has meaning inspite of the fact that there is no rational basis for that conclusion. Reason gives us facts but they do not lead to meaning.

As you can see, the solution postmodernism provides is no solution at all. You maybe asking, "what does this have to do with me?" I'll answer that in my next post.