Carl Wells Books

Last week we began looking at some ideas that I think the American Christian church could consider. I make these recommendations as a professing Christian with a high view of what the church can accomplish when it acts within God’s will.

7/We need to be reading the Bible a lot more than we do. This is true of non-Christians, of course, but it is also true of Christians. Among Christians there is a lack of Bible knowledge, and that lack of Bible knowledge is being inherited by our children. God gave us the Bible from which to learn. The Bible includes plenty of material from which to build a systematic theology, but it also includes lots of true stories which help us put meat on the bones of our theology. It seems to me it is very difficult to understand what Christianity means in practice unless one has a growing knowledge of the Bible. We should be reading the Bible over and over. Multiple readings are needed by all of us. The Bible admittedly is not an easy book to read, but it repays the work we put in. We can eat an elephant if we do it gradually, over weeks and months, one bite at a time. The same is true of reading the Bible. Persistence pays off in the long run, as is true of many things in life. If we read the Bible, we can then in good conscience require our children also to begin to read the Bible.

8/Pietism is a deadly problem in the church. Pietism reduces the faith to the doings of the church and (sort of) the family. This is not what the Bible teaches. The faith applies to all of life, and it applies to our interactions with the world, including our interactions with the civil authorities. Pietism gives us an excuse to abdicate our responsibilities. We Christians, like the rest of mankind, tend to look for and to like excuses! But our excuses are not plausible.

9/Antinomianism (anti-God’s-law-ism) is a deadly problem in the church. This applies right across the board, whether we are dealing with church and family things, or with the laws of the civil government. We are unwilling to see what God says and to adjust our thoughts and actions appropriately. We want to live how we want to live without reference to what God requires. Then we are disappointed when our antinomianism ends up trashing our families, and ends up bringing our Christian civilization to the brink of disaster, and to the brink of possible disappearance. God saves us by grace, but grace brings with it concomitant responsibilities. If we refuse to fulfill those responsibilities, we hurt not only ourselves and our families and our church, we also gravely harm the world around us. The world needs to see and hear a biblical form of Christianity–and so do we.

10/Warmongering is a deadly problem in the church. Many, perhaps most, American Christians are cheerleaders for the countless warring interventions our country makes. These interventions bring disaster, crippling, and death, to many millions of people. These are people who have done nothing to us to deserve the horrific fate we bring upon them. When we don’t intervene via war, we constantly intervene in other ways. When did God appoint us to run the world, when it is clear we cannot run even our own country with any sanctified common sense? We the murderers of 61,000,000 unborn children have been appointed the moral arbiters of the world? I don’t think so. It is good that we love the place where we were born, but it is the exact reverse of good that we support all the wicked behavior of our country in its dealings with foreign countries. The U.S. behaves with the grace of a hog on ice, and we Christians shrug or more generally cheerfully acquiesce. Consider the possibility that God will tell us that we Christians have blood on our hands. What are we going to say if He tells us we are murderers, cripplers, and torturers? Will He just give us a free pass because we are Christians? Consider the possibility that He will not excuse our callous carelessness. If we think that Jesus Christ automatically will go our bond because we claim to be Christians, maybe we will be unpleasantly surprised by God’s response. How dare we shrug at the horrors we commit abroad.

11/Zionist Christianity is a deadly error. Christians who support the state of Israel no matter what are misreading the Bible. They are bringing support and aid to enemies of God. If we want to help Jews and Muslims in the Middle East, that can be done by supporting evangelistic efforts to reach both people groups. Jews and Muslims need the gospel. We have the gospel, and many of us have enough money to be able to support evangelistic outreach. If you want to help Jews and/or Muslims, belly up to the bar with money to support evangelists. Far too many Christians are idiotically supporting Israel, due to an intellectually disgraceful misreading of the Bible.

12/Mentoring of mature Christians toward immature Christians can be a very good way to help people grow in the faith. We seldom attempt such mentoring, whether as a church, or as individuals. Lots of Christian families are struggling with how to live with practical wisdom in the everyday world. They just keep on struggling, and the church almost never steps in. Nor do Christian individuals step in. It would be embarrassing to do so, no doubt–at least at first. But it needs to be done! It can be done graciously, at least by some of our number. Not all Christians would be gracious in trying to help, but many would be. We have countless millions of struggling Christians. Here are a few categories: fathers who need help in learning how to lead their families; single mothers whose homes are chaotic; young men who are unable to get and hold a job; families that struggle with getting their finances under control. Those are simply examples; the way that ordinary Christians face practical difficulties are endless. If we Christians really cared about such people, we would find a way to help them. We would involve our own lives in the lives of our Christian brothers and sisters who need help. But we almost never do this! We let people struggle, struggle, and struggle. People with great potential for good in building the kingdom of God are left to keep on struggling–to their harm and to the church’s harm, and to the world’s harm. Non-Christian Jordan Peterson has struck a nerve with his encouragement to young men that they need to be working and productive. He is not even a Christian, but he sees how harmful it is to young men when they are not responsible. If a non-Christian can understand that, why cannot we Christians see it? If we saw it, and if we helped struggling young men get a job and earn some money and earn some self-respect, would not that be a wonderful thing? The potential for Christians to mentor Christians surely must be one of the most underutilized aspects of our current brand of Christianity. The potential is so great for good! But we do so little. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest, surely we are no higher than a 1. A practical Christianity will begin to use mentoring to help Christians. Mentoring may also allow us to help non-Christians, and may encourage some of them, in the long run, to join us in the faith. That would not be rotten either.

I hope to continue with this series next week.

I am not a theologian. I’m just a guy. But I’ve read the Bible a lot, and I am a professing Christian and have been one for decades. Plus, I have a really high view of the church. That is, I believe the church is very important to God, and that God can and does work through the church to accomplish lots of good things. So this discussion is not coming from someone who is an enemy of the church. I may be wrongheaded and these ideas may be foolish, but they are meant to build up the church rather than to tear it down. Use what seems helpful and reject the rest.

All that said, I confess to a vast frustration with how the church does things in the United States. So here I am going to list a few ideas I think the church could and should consider. I will touch only briefly on each point. Obviously each topic could be discussed at great length, but that won’t happen here. This will be a numbered list, and likely it will take three weeks to get through it all. The order is not important except perhaps that the last number of the last segment will represent a summary.

1/Christians need to move toward tithing. According to the Christian group emptytomb, we contribute 2.5% of our increase to the church. But God in the Old Testament required a tithe (ten percent) of us, as stated in numerous places and summarized spectacularly in Malachi 3:6-12. He doesn’t drop that instruction in the New Testament. In fact Jesus Christ Himself seems to confirm that we should be tithing (Matthew 23:23). So we in New Testament times, when we have a much clearer view of how we have been saved through the grace of God via Jesus Christ, are giving one-quarter of what Old Testament believers (who could understand Jesus Christ only dimly) were expected to give. That is nutty. A tithe should be the barest beginning point of our willingness to build the kingdom of God with our finances. If we tithed, the church would have plenty of money to do whatever needed to be done. Granted, moving from 2.5% giving to 10% giving all at once would be psychologically difficult for most of us, because we don’t really trust God to keep us from starving to death. But He is patient with us, and any person who increases his giving gradually would find that God continues to sustain him. Within a few years, every Christian could be at or close to 10% giving. And we would have a deeper trust in God.

2/Christian churches have a powerful weapon to fight evil, in that the churches can excommunicate people who refuse to repent. But we don’t use that weapon. We let evildoers continue in our midst, without acting to warn them. For example, how many pro-abortion Christians continue in the church, with the church never acting to warn such people? This is cruel to evildoers, who might repent if warned. It is also cruel to the church, which continues to be weakened by obvious enemies of God in our midst.

3/The infants of Christian parents should be baptized. They were born into the family of God because their parents are Christians. Of course they can decide to desert the church later in life, but they should begin life as members in good standing of God’s church, exactly as God ordered when He instituted circumcision in Old Testament times. Baptism replaces circumcision, but the principle is exactly the same. We are in the kingdom of God by grace, not because we are smart and chose God. We can unchoose Him, and many do, but the children of Christians should start out as full members of the church.

4/The notion that being baptized (as infant, child, young person, or adult) means you are without question a person who can never work his way out of God’s family, is a crazy notion. This teaching confuses us greatly. I have heard an intelligent and godly pastor say that a baptized child cannot be lost. Whoa! Where did that come from? Certainly not from the Bible. We need to be taught that being a Christian is a wonderful gift from God, but also that such a gift brings us concomitant responsibilities to obey Him in the way that we live. That is what the Bible teaches. My forthcoming book If: God’s Covenant of Grace deals with this issue at length. Here a paragraph will have to do.

5/Baptized Christian children should be taking communion. Some Christians understand that infant baptism is the most biblical type of baptism. They do baptize their infants, and heaven bless them for that. Yet many of the same people turn right around and refuse to permit their children to take communion! Such a position seems schizophrenic. Such people understand that God wants the children of His believers to be part of the family of God, but then somehow those same children immediately become second class citizens of God’s family. As James Jordan has approximately said, even non-Baptists in this country are Baptists. But such a position is completely illogical. Christian children should be taking communion, just as circumcised Old Testament Jewish children participated in the Passover feast.

6/Christian parents, most of your children are basically clueless about what is at stake in life. You seem to think that because your children are in church every week, and many of them have professed faith in Christ, have been baptized, and are taking communion, that they are automatically saved and going to heaven. Really? Your children don’t even try to sing along during the service. You see that they don’t sing, but apparently this never sets off warning bells in your head. Your children don’t really understand that they need a Savior, and that living a Christian life requires humility before God, and hard work. They also don’t understand that we are in a war for Christian civilization, and that they need to be thinking, learning, and growing. I don’t mean your children are irredeemably rotten. They have some good qualities, and their potential is good or even excellent. But they are not being challenged intellectually and spiritually. It is wonderful that you bring your children to church every week, but you need to be asking a lot more of them. Ask more of yourself, then ask more of them.

Well, that is enough for one week. Probably there will be two more segments.

I have been discussing a few things that seem obvious, at least to me, but apparently really aren’t obvious at all, at least to normal people. Today I will conclude with a handful more.

9/People who believe in a relatively limited, relatively restrained civil government should expect to educate their children at their own expense. Yet we find this is not true at all. Bible-believing Christians, and/or people of conservative temperament, continue to send their children to public schools and public universities year after year, decade after weary decade. This happens despite all the known problems with public school education, and with university education. Granted, a tiny percentage of people have rejected public education for their children–although sadly many such people still teach or administer in public schools or public universities–but their numbers are relatively small. Why the disconnect between a belief in small civil government, and a willingness to send our children to public schools at any level? The answer is money. Almost all of us, Christians or non-Christian conservatives included, like to get something for nothing. If we can do it by pretending it is moral because the law permits it, better yet. We expect we will get our children’s education paid for by other people for the most part (they will pay the taxes), and we will have to pay only a small part (our share of paid taxes will be relatively small). Our mathematical skills may be sketchy–public education turns out to cost over $10,000.00 per student per year, nationwide–but our hearts are consistently larcenous. Still, there is such a humongous moral contradiction between our believing in limited government on the one hand, and our turning our highly valued children over to a civil government of proven incompetence and often of proven evil, that this seems deeply and obviously weird to me. But apparently it is not obvious at all, or people wouldn’t keep doing it.

10/The conservative mainstream elite thinkers who get published on the Internet and who infest the television screen are often intellectually shallow, willing to suck up to the left, warmongers, and hopelessly trite. This is not true completely across the board, of course. But it is so often true as to make it astonishing that we continue to listen to these people. In my blog post of October 25, 2018, I discussed the policy recommendations of one well-known conservative thinker. Some of his recommendations are terrifying in their blindness. Yet this man is very far from being the worst of the mainstream conservative lot. When the Covington Catholic boys were being unjustly pilloried in Main Sleaze Media, some conservatives jumped on the insult bandwagon as well. They couldn’t take a day to research the situation and try to figure out what really happened. No, they were right there with the idiotic comments, right along with the left-wing usual suspects. Most conservative commentators are not trustworthy. Yet most people who are Bible-believing Christians, and most people of conservative instincts, continue to rely on these mainstream conservatives to help us think through issues. It is not as if there are no truly honest thinkers. There are quite a few of them, if we only look for them. But we don’t look. Apparently most of us are far too lazy to search out Christian or conservative thinkers of high principles and uncompromising integrity. All this seems obviously true. But apparently it is not obvious at all. Apparently I have underestimated the intellectual laziness of ordinary Christians and conservatives. Will I never learn? To quote Lily Tomlin approximately, I try to be cynical but it is impossible to keep up.

11/We need to stop talking about what a free country we are until we stop killing unborn children. It seems obvious that freedom is incommensurate with murdering babies. But apparently it is not obvious at all. We continue to hear constantly about how wonderful it is that we are a free country. Freedom is not license to kill just because the ones being killed can’t defend themselves. Freedom stops at the other person’s body. So if we don’t stop at the other person’s body, we are not a responsible free country. We are baby-killing monsters. Supposedly a canary is kept in a coal mine, so that when the canary keels over dead or dying, the coal miners understand that deadly gas has been released, and they need to get out of the coal mine fast. But in the U.S. we have seen 61,000,000 million canaries keel over dead, and continue to say that all is well and we can keep on doing the same old same old. Please stop telling me what a great free country this is. Your comments are ridiculous. But even smart Christian people do this! All this seems obviously weird to me, but apparently it is not obvious at all.

12/Almost everyone is afraid of the power of Israel’s lobby. The huge influence of Israel on our foreign policy is egregiously bad, but almost no one is willing to say this. The tail is wagging the dog. Most people who know better are unwilling to speak the truth because they are afraid of being called anti-semitic. This includes of course much of the conservative mainstream (see #10 above). Even more horrifying is the fact that a huge portion of the Christian population mindlessly supports Israel. These Christian Zionists are bringing disgrace to the name of Christianity by their beliefs and actions. All this is as obvious as the fact that we need air to breathe. But almost no one seems to understand what is so plain.

13/There is something profoundly wrong with our brand of Christianity. This can be proven with almost mathematical finality, but it seems to have escaped those of us who are Christians. The country is reeling from bad and mad policies, right? We all agree with that fact. But how could that be true if we are as Christian a country as we claim to be? About 70% of the people in this country self-identify as Christian. Approximately 50% have some plausible connection to a Christian church of one sort or another. Our Christian influence should be so overwhelmingly powerful that every action this country takes would reflect Christian ways of thinking. I will immediately be told that left-leaning liberal “Christians” who are not Christians at all, are the problem. Baloney. I have attended several Bible-believing churches and I know that thousands more of them exist. It is not just the liberals. It is the Christianity of all of us that has somehow gone wrong. Our Christianity is not very Christian. This is almost as true of the Bible-believing church as it is of the liberal church for whom the Bible is a rubber nose to be twisted whichever way they want. Granted, there may be ways in which the liberal church is worse, but the difference is so small as not to be worth haggling over. The American Christianity I see–liberal and conservative, Bible-despising and Bible-believing–is warmongering, thieving, intellectually lazy, self-absorbed, and self-righteous. I grant and even insist that there is good in the Christian church. They’ll have to throw me out to get rid of me. But we are not even close to what we should be. That is the reason that our nation is pursuing bad and mad policies. It is 100% (perhaps 99% at the least) the fault of the American Christian church. This is so obvious that it scarcely seems worth stating, but as near as I can tell almost no one understands this. What seems painfully and embarrassingly obvious apparently is not obvious at all.

Maybe it’s just me. I have listed thirteen things that seem obvious to me, none of which are obvious to ordinary people. So maybe I am simply so out of sync with reality that I can no longer discern the difference between truth and fiction. I think these thirteen ideas are on the right track, but who knows? Think for yourself. Anyway, it has been fun for me to try to discuss some thing which are obvious-but-not-obvious-at-all.

Last week we began listing some things that seem obvious–to me, at least–but apparently aren’t really obvious at all. If they were as obvious as I think they are, lots more people would agree with me and the way people think and act would change. We began with relatively minor “obvious” things, and are moving now into more serious matters. Here are a few more non-obvious obvious things.

5/Parents have no right to let their children bring misery to other people by their public behavior. But lots of parents don’t seem to understand that. That includes many Christian parents, who surely should know better. While I am not a parent, even I can see that parenting is a tough challenge. Still, it seems obvious that the teaching both of the Christian faith and of non-Christian common sense would teach us to keep our children from behaving in ways that interfere with other peoples’ enjoyment of life.

6/Filthy language is not good and we should not use it in public. I realize that I am complaining about something that is happening because we as a civilization are losing our Christian moorings. But it continues to shock me that ordinary people permit themselves to use filthy language in public. Several recent examples come to mind. A/A successful college basketball coach quoted his player using the f-word as part of the player’s self-evaluation of his own poor performance–and quoted him with approval, as indicative of how the player was accepting responsibility for his own poor play. B/A different successful college basketball coach was suspended for one tournament game for having used profane language in berating officials during a game. What makes both cases even more interesting is that both coaches come off as devoted family men with children they care about. They don’t seem like constantly grumpy, constantly rude people. Yet they permit themselves such language and really think nothing of it. And apparently almost everyone else thinks nothing of it as well. C/Another college basketball coach was quoted as using the f-word as she berated her players. These three people are relatively prominent, relatively famous and successful people. But they remind me of a man (clearly not prominent or successful) who came into our place of business a decade or more ago. D/He was looking for work. He was wearing a t-shirt with one word emblazoned on the front. You guessed it. The four letter f-word. He was trying to drum up work, and he thought the best way into my heart as a potential employer of him was to wear that t-shirt into our store. He was clearly a man a decade or more ahead of his time–he should be coaching college basketball and making millions of dollars a year to set an example for his players. Instead all he had was this [expletive deleted] t-shirt.

7/The welfare state hurts recipients very greatly over the long haul. We are all born with a need to be productive, and similarly with a need to feel productive. This does not require us to be wealthy and successful. But we need to work and to know that we are providing for ourselves and our families. If you take that away from us by encouraging us not to work, you hurt us deeply. Granted, the temptation to live on the production of others, despite the fact that we are able-bodied adults, is very, very high for almost all of mankind. Almost everyone has larceny in his heart. But as obvious as that fact is, just as obvious is the harm we do to ourselves by refusing to earn our own way. We become less the people we could be, with less dignity and less self-respect. This is not rocket science. This is Human Nature 101. Yet as obvious as this should be to all of us, it seems to be not obvious at all to almost everyone. And not obvious at all to almost everyone, is how Social Security and Medicare are part of the welfare state, and are harming the character of millions of people. That is a bridge too far even for many people who would agree with me that the welfare state egregiously hurts ordinary people over the long haul.

8/Democracy on the national level is largely a fraud. Democracy at the local level may work to a certain extent–we the people getting what we want and ask for and deserve and getting it good and hard, to quote H. L. Mencken approximately–but on the national level the system is set up for our betters to tell us what to do. If you don’t like busing, abortion, illegal immigration, the bailout, preemptive wars, then you need to shut up and stop being such a bigot. The moral elite running things will give us what they know we should have. The fraudulence of “our democracy” seems clear, but apparently to almost everyone it is not clear at all. Perhaps the self-deception that we are in control of things is a self-deception which gives us an excuse to keep on living the way we are without the responsibility to look for a more honest system.

Those are a few more obvious-but-not-obvious things. We will try to conclude with a small handful more next week.