Carl Wells Books

First of all I need to explain why I have failed to post anything on the previous three Thursdays. My computer went south on May 8. I didn’t get it back in working order until May 29. I’m sorry I was gone, but on the other hand I am grateful to be back.

This is part IV in a series in which I discuss ideas that the American Christian church could consider as possible ways to make the church more effective in the lives of both Christian and non-Christian people. I write as a professing Christian with a very optimistic view of what the church can accomplish.

19/Christians could consider that it might be a good idea to have small nations in which a distinctly Christian law order existed. This is a follow-up to point 18 about secession and about whether it is possible to have separation of church and state. Christians don’t seem to understand that there can never be a separation of religion and state. Humanists establish their own humanist view of what laws are good and which are evil. Christians could do the same. In fact I think God requires us to establish a law order which reflects His morality as demonstrated in the Bible. I don’t want to conquer the United States with the sword and establish a top-down Christian law order. I want Christians to understand that we should have our own countries–make them as small as you like, or smaller yet–where we can honor God with a civil law order that is distinctly Christian. This may sound radical, but it is not really anything other than common sense. Please at least start thinking about this. Due to intellectual laziness, and probably also due to the unwillingness to accept responsibility, we have been swallowing the humanist snake oil about church and state for a long time. We need small Christian countries with distinctive Christian law orders.

20/Christians could make a much more determined effort to get to know other people. This includes our fellow Christians, but it also includes non-Christians. We need to have non-Christians whom we begin to respect, pray for, and love in the agape sense. Agape love wants what is best for other people. What is best for anyone is that he becomes a Christian and begins to live in ways that honor God. If we know people we will see their strengths and their weaknesses. If we can respect, pray for, and love people, perhaps God will be able to use us (or, in answer to our prayers, use some other Christian) to help move a non-Christian toward becoming a Christian. We are too self-absorbed. We are saved by grace, right? Hence we ought to be willing to extend grace to other people by getting to know them, by respecting them, by loving them, by praying for them. God does the hard work, but we have our part to do also.

21/Christians could consider that perhaps the Bible teaches that there is no eternal torment for enemies of God. We believe in eternal torment, physical and psychological, largely because we have begun with that presupposition. But why? We need to believe what the Bible teaches. If we read the Bible with the willingness to let the Bible teach us rather than to begin with presuppositions that are wrong, the case for eternal torment begins to look very shaky. What the Bible seems to teach is that God may well annihilate his enemies, after the proper amount of punishment has been applied. Surely that is bad enough to suit any of us. To cease to exist is pretty strong punishment, and seems far more in accord with God’s character as revealed in the Bible than does the eternal torment line. To begin reading on the topic, please consider Edward Fudge’s book The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment. Available on the Internet is a useful essay by Samuel Dawson entitled “Jesus’ Teaching on Hell.” Or consider reading my book What Are God’s Goals? which is available both as paperback or in an inexpensive electronic version.

22/Christians could consider that there is no reason at all for us to assume that democracy is automatically good, and all other forms of government are automatically illegitimate. Winston Churchill, not claiming to be original, said “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” This is very clever, and we have believed it for a long time, but it is also inaccurate. Better forms of government are possible. A truly legitimate form of government is possible.
What is legitimate is civil government that honors God. Humanists pretend to believe in democracy, but when push comes to shove, what they really believe in is pushing and shoving–bossing other people around. What Christians should believe in is civil government that honors God, and thus protects ordinary people and leaves them alone. That is not necessarily and automatically going to happen in a democracy. Christians need to start thinking theoretically about these kind of things. As long as we refuse to think, the supposed believers in democracy are going to keep on shoving their “democratic” soft totalitarianism on us.

23/Christians could consider the possibility that we need to do a much better job helping our Christian brothers and sisters find out what are their specific gifts which they have been given by God. The Bible teaches that God gives each Christian at least one gift to be used for the building up of the church and the kingdom of God. See for example 1 Corinthians 12:1-31. Each Christian has been given at least one gift: “to each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.” (v. 7) Something is “natural” to each believer–that is, naturally given by God, because God wants to build up His church. When we use our gifts, we help the church. But it is not always clear what our gifts are, and we don’t help each other find out what they are. Thus Christians have gifts which they never identify and as a result those gifts are not consciously employed for the benefit of others. This is a tragedy of world historical importance! I am convinced that if each Christian understood what his gift was, and made a conscious effort to put that gift to use, the church would grow in effectiveness, and we all would have a vastly increased sense of our usefulness to God, and a vastly improved peace of mind. We are drifting! The gift we have been given may not be spectacular, but it is needed. Often a person is given more than one gift. Year in and year out I remain astonished at how blind the church is to the untapped resources we have in all our members.

24/Christians could consider the possibility that we need to be aware that we have a responsibility to fight evil. We are war with evil–or rather, we should be at war with evil. We adults don’t understand this, and very clearly our children are getting the same incomplete message. They are at church because they have to be. They sit quietly and are praised for that, but they are totally clueless that we are at war. They are clueless because we adults are clueless. It doesn’t bode well for the future. No wonder our young people often desert the church when they get the chance. No wonder the church is thought of as feminine rather than as a place where men can be put to hard and difficult but worthwhile work.

25/The church could consider that something, somehow, is vastly wrong. I like all 24 of my preceding points. I think they are in the ballpark of being basically correct. In fact I really think they are 100% accurate. But assume for the sake of argument that I am just a grumpy old man, and all 24 of my recommendations are drivel. Okay, fine. So I’m confused. So I’m an idiot. But still, something must be wrong somewhere. 50% of the people in this country have a plausible connection to a Christian church. Moreover, 70% of the population self-identifies as Christian. We have the numbers. This is not Pakistan, where Christians are a tiny and persecuted minority. This is the United States of America, with strong Christian roots and a strong Christian contemporary presence. And all we have to do is look around us and we can see that our Christianity isn’t working very well. We are warmongers. We destroy people with the welfare state. We abort 61 million babies in 46 years. This is not happening because it has been forced upon us. It is happening because we Christians let it happen, or perhaps rather more accurately because we caused it to happen. Something is wrong with our brand of Christianity. Not sort of wrong here and there on a few minor points. No, something is vastly, humongously, horrifically wrong somehow or other. So while I may be a confused idiot, how do we explain a nation that has gone so wildly wrong unless we begin to look at the type of Christian faith which we believe in and which we live out in our daily lives. Something is vastly wrong.

This series is an effort to make practical suggestions about what the American Christian church could do in an effort to improve its effectiveness in the lives of many people. I write as one who professes to be a Christian, and I have an optimistic view of what the church can accomplish when it seeks to obey the God of the Bible.

13/The church could vastly increase the amount of fellowship among believers. To have Christian fellowship with like-minded believers is one of the great blessings of the Christian faith. But it is underutilized to a shocking extent. I am always astonished at how seldom Christians attempt to spend time with other Christians. People tend to spend time only with their families. Christians have lots of Christian acquaintances, but few Christian friends. We don’t get to know one another well. We seem to think we can mostly get along well by ourselves, or by ourselves with our families. But by staying by ourselves we are missing a chance to be influenced for good by other Christians, also missing a chance to influence others for good, and not least are missing a chance just to feel good by being with principled people we respect! Our families are important, indeed crucial, but we need other Christians as well. In fact many Christian families are not doing all that well by themselves; they need the input of other Christians. There is no doubt that getting to know other people well has risks. What if they don’t like or respect us, once they get to know us well? What if their theology is funky? What if their politics are as funky as their theology? And so on. But the benefits are well worth the risks. There are some interesting Christian people out there. We can help each other if/when we get to know each other better.

14/The church could spend more time in trying to read and think. For the most part the church is anti-intellectual. People with good minds spend a lifetime watching mediocre television shows. Sure, some of the shows are good. But a lifetime? No reading? We are unlikely to learn very much unless we are willing to start doing some serious reading. Our anti-intellectualism is deadly for our ability to interact wisely with the world around us. I guess at least we are consistent. We aren’t reading the Bible, and we aren’t reading anything else either. Do we know any history? To ask such a question is almost embarrassing, because we know the answer. Most of us are blessed with ordinary minds, but ordinary minds are usually amazingly powerful. Instead of exercising our minds, we read nothing. It is heart-breaking.

15/The church could spend some effort in trying to think about the goals of God. We tend to focus on ourselves only. Am I saved? Okay, yes, that’s it, I’m good to go for the rest of life. I understand everything I need. But we seem never to consider that God may have goals that He intends to accomplish, and that maybe He wants us to help Him reach those goals. We claim to have a high view of the goodness of God, but we treat Him as if He exists only to keep us from going to hell, and to put us in heaven after 80 or 90 comfortable years on the earth. But it would be logical that the God whom we believe to be good, would also have wise and good goals that He wants to accomplish. Yes, one of His goals seems to have been to save us, but was that His only goal? We Christians seem pretty self-absorbed. That is our human nature, and is not shocking, but shouldn’t our nature be changed somewhat for the better after our regeneration and after the Holy Spirit takes up residence in us? Shouldn’t we begin to have the potential to see things from God’s point of view rather than solely from our own perspective? I have written a book entitled What Are God’s Goals?. This book is highly recommended–well, okay, it is highly recommended by me. But doesn’t it make sense that a good and wise God would have important goals which we could think about much more than we do?

16/Christians could begin to educate their children at their own expense. Many of us claim to believe in having a civil government which is limited in taxing power. But most Christians turn right around and expect the civil authorities to tax people highly enough to pay for the education of our children. Where is the logic in that? Doesn’t the Eighth Commandment (Exodus 20:15) require us to educate our children at our own expense? If we did that we could talk about God and His Son Jesus Christ as we educate our children. We could keep our children safe. We could make their moral environment better than it is. We could in the long run offer a place for the children of non-Christians to hear the gospel as they are educated. The good news is that Christians have begun to have Christian schools and have begun to homeschool many of our Christian children. Christian education is in its beginning stages, but a serious start has been made. We won’t despise the day of small things (Zechariah 4:10). We can do better, but a serious start has been made.

17/Christians could begin to extricate themselves from their dependence on the welfare state. That includes education (see #16 above), but it also includes things like unemployment insurance, Social Security, Medicare. We tend to feel angry when we see women having babies out of wedlock and living on taxes we pay. We forget our own dependence on the taxes paid by others. If we can remove ourselves psychologically from our expectation of living to a significant extent on taxes paid for by our neighbors, we will be ready to begin to build a Christian civilization which is much more honest and self-reliant than the quasi-Christian civilization we have been wallowing in for so many decades.

18/Christians could begin to consider that secession from the United States might well be a viable option for us. If we had our own small countries on this continent, we could begin to honor God with our laws. This would involve no force against non-Christians who don’t want to live in our Christian countries. Most of the ex-U.S. would probably prefer a humanist brand of religious faith. That would be fine. Abort babies until you’re blue in the face. Enjoy sexual perversion. Increase the welfare state. If Christians begin to understand that secession is viable and that it is legitimate to have our own Christian countries, we would have an impetus to start doing some theoretical thinking about how a Christian civil government could and should be organized. We haven’t even got up to square one yet. We are still pretending that there can be a separation of religion and state.

Hopefully we will be able to wind up this series next week.