Borderline heretical. . .

Peter Leithart had a rather elegant line in an article about religion in America.  Our churchy national soul weirdly inhabits a body of peculiar, borderline-heretical actual churches.  It says out loud what few people dare to admit.  Many of those churches on the landscape of our cities and towns are neither orthodox nor Biblical but live on the very fringes of the faith.  From non-denominational churches without creed or confession or doctrinal oversight to those denominations who have kept the structure but no longer seem to care about what is preached or taught, churches in America are filled with a thin veneer of Christianity and not a real and historic Christian faith and identity.  While it seems uncharitable to say this about our neighbors down the block, it must be said.

What passes for gospel in these borderline heretical churches is nothing that the gospel writers or the great preachers of the New Testament (like St. Paul) would recognize.  In fact, just the opposite, they might expect some rather blunt words from a guy like St. Paul about what they are passing off as Christian and the rest of us be given a warning about being unequally yoked with those of faulty confession and errant creed.  I am certainly not happy about this but the days when someone could presume that a congregation down the road was mostly orthodox at least on the matter of Christ and salvation are long gone.  

I once heard a podcast where it was said that Presbyterians were close to Lutherans, for example.  The problem here is that Presbyterians are not Presbyterian anymore -- not in any confessional sense.  Most of them have readily abandoned the things that once defined them.  In fact, in our own larger identity as Lutherans, we must live side by side those who seem to have forgotten that Lutherans wrote down what they believed, taught, and confessed or that these Confessions had normative definition for what Lutherans were supposed to believe and practice.  The odd thing is that among denominationals you never quite know what you are getting when you show up at a congregation that has a name and belongs to a certain jurisdiction.  That is also a problem for Rome.  Although the worship wars of Roman Catholics are the news, the preaching and teaching is also in conflict.  There are Roman Catholic parishes in which the official stances with respect to the role of women, LGBTQIA+, marriage, family planning, and sin routinely flaunt the official doctrine espoused in the Catholic Catechism.  So, it would seem, Lutherans and Presbyterians are not quite alone in this conundrum.

Those who leave for the non-denominational "churches" or those who welcome home their kids from the same are not simply leaving behind a name or a style of worship.  They are abandoning the faith of the Scriptures and the faithful deposit once delivered.  It is not a mere matter of giving up water that does something or bread that is body or the Word which is God speaking, they are leaving in the dust the very red thread that connects us with the saints of old and marks our fidelity down through the generations.  Rome is surely the fool for presuming that popes or bishops can suffice to keep this apostolic unity in tact but the rest of us are the fools for presuming that holding to the idea of a book called the Bible can do the same.  "We believe the Bible" was never sufficient but now it is even less a definition of the faith.  Lutherans knew this in the sixteenth century when we practically begged our Roman opponents to show us where we had departed from Scripture, apostolic custom, catholic doctrine and practice.  

In my own community, odd names have replaced old ones (named of saints or doctrines like the Trinity).  Life something or other or edgy names designed to say "we are not your grandfather's church" are being more obvious than once thought.  They are not your grandfather's church -- not in doctrine, teaching, preaching, or practice.  Entrepreneurial Christianity in America has succeeded in learning the wrong lessons and has become peculiarly comfortable giving up what those who went before held sacred in favor of a Christianity that is hardly Christian at all.  It would be easy to dismiss or to laugh about were it not that those in the comfortable padded seats with their designer coffees in their hands do not know that the gospel they are hearing is borderline heretical and has no power to answer the guilt of sin or raise the dead.  The sooner we admit this, the better.