I think Dr. Mohler has made some excellent observations that merit repeating. So, here you go!
Christian Values Cannot Save Anyone
Christian Values Cannot Save Anyone
A recent letter to columnist Carolyn Hax of The
Washington Post seemed straightforward enough. “I am a stay-at-home mother
of four who has tried to raise my family under the same strong Christian values
that I grew up with,” the woman writes. “Therefore I was shocked when my oldest
daughter, ‘Emily,’ suddenly announced she had ‘given up believing in God’ and
decided to ‘come out’ as an atheist.”
The idea of a 16-year-old atheist in the house would be
enough to alarm any Christian parent, and rightly so. The thought that a
secular advice columnist for The Washington Post might be the source of
help seems very odd, but desperation can surely lead a parent to seek help
almost anywhere.
You usually get what you expect from an advice columnist
like this — therapeutic counsel based in a secular worldview and a deep
commitment to personal autonomy. Carolyn Hax responds to this mother with an
admonition to respect the integrity of her daughter’s declaration of
non-belief. She adds, “Parents can and should teach their beliefs and values,
but when a would-be disciple stops believing, it’s not a ‘decision’ or ‘choice’
to ‘reject’ church or family or tradition or virtue or whatever else has
hitched a cultural ride with faith.”
That is patent nonsense, of course. Declarations of
adolescent unbelief often are exactly what Hax argues they are not: rejections
of “church or family or tradition or virtue.” Hax does offer some legitimate
insights, suggesting that honesty is to be preferred to dishonesty and that
such adolescent statements are often indications of a phase of intellectual
questioning or just trying on a personality for style.
Hax then tells this distraught mother that she “didn’t throw
out what my childhood, including my church, taught me; I still apply what I
believe in. I just apply it to a secular life.” In other words, Hax asserts
that she maintains many of the values she learned as a child in church, and
simply applies these values now to a secular life.
“How can I help my daughter see that she is making a serious
mistake with her life if she chooses to reject her God and her faith?,” the
mother asks. Hax tells the mother to accept the daughter’s atheism and get over
her “disappointment that she isn’t turning out just as you envisioned.”
What else would you expect a secular columnist who operates
from a secular worldview to say?
The real problem does not lie with Carolyn Hax’s answer,
however, but with the mother’s question. The problem appears at the onset, when
the mother states that she has “tried to raise my family under the same strong
Christian values that I grew up with.”
Christian values are the problem. Hell will be filled with
people who were avidly committed to Christian values. Christian values cannot
save anyone and never will. The gospel of Jesus Christ is not a Christian
value, and a comfortability with Christian values can blind sinners to their
need for the gospel.
This one sentence may not accurately communicate this
mother’s understanding, but it appears to be perfectly consistent with the
larger context of her question and the source of the advice she sought.
Parents who raise their children with nothing more than
Christian values should not be surprised when their children abandon those
values. If the child or young person does not have a firm commitment to Christ
and to the truth of the Christian faith, values will have no binding authority,
and we should not expect that they would. Most of our neighbors have some
commitment to Christian values, but what they desperately need is salvation
from their sins. This does not come by Christian values, no matter how
fervently held. Salvation comes only by the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Human beings are natural-born moralists, and moralism is the
most potent of all the false gospels. The language of “values” is the language
of moralism and cultural Protestantism — what the Germans called Kulturprotestantismus.
This is the religion that produces cultural Christians, and cultural
Christianity soon dissipates into atheism, agnosticism, and other forms of
non-belief. Cultural Christianity is the great denomination of moralism, and
far too many church folk fail to recognize that their own religion is only
cultural Christianity — not the genuine Christian faith.
The language of values is all that remains when the
substance of belief disappears. Tragically, many churches seem to perpetuate
their existence by values, long after they abandon the faith.
We should not pray for Christian morality to disappear or
for Christian values to evaporate. We should not pray to live in Sodom or in
Vanity Fair. But a culture marked even by Christian values is in desperate need
of evangelism, and that evangelism requires the knowledge that Christian values
and the gospel of Jesus Christ are not the same thing.
I pray that this young woman and her mother find common hope
and confidence in the salvation that comes only through Christ — not by
Christian values. Otherwise, we are facing far more than a young woman “making
a serious mistake with her life.” We are talking about what matters for
eternity. Christian values cannot save anyone.
-Dr. Al Mohler-
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