Therapeutic deism did not begin recently. It goes back to the demand of the sick for God to fix what was wrong and to the demand of the hungry to be fed without earthly labor to provide the food. We have always found a temptation to substitute the present for the eternal. At some point, however, it become the dominant image of God and the dominant image of salvation. We are no longer the guilty or shameful who are searching for cleansing or the sinners in search of redemption. We have become the discontent in search of pleasure, the sad in search of happiness, the bored in search of excitement, the lonely in search of friendship, and, under it all, the spectator in search of entertainment. The problem with this is that you do not need a Savior, a God incarnate, or a cross and empty tomb to provide these things. These live not in eternity but in the present, in the moment, if you will.
Though it would be tempting to place this blame at the feet of the liberals, we are all to blame. We have so eloquently described God as healer that the people no longer look for or need a God who redeems. They are looking for a therapist to listen, for someone to approve and commend them as they are, and for anyone to show them how they might satisfy their longings rather than reorder them according to God's will and purpose. Christianity’s dalliance with healing and therapy has become greater than the quest for redemption, for salvation, and for righteousness. When Jesus sent forth His disciples to heal (therapeuete) the sick, we all took Him at His word and made it into a promise that would be fulfilled now. All of our expanded analogies using healing to describe salvation have born the wrong fruit. We want and expect God to do more for us today than for eternity. We want to flourish in the here and now — body, soul, heart, and mind — and this is what have come to expect and demand from God. To quote Captain Piccard, "make it so."
We were encouraged along the way by things outside the faith to look to our thoughts, emotions, and desires to define what happiness looked and how to live well. We learned from society that our stories were more important than real truth and experience was more reliable than facts. We have told ourselves this over and over again until we were convinced that this was God speaking to us and so the cultural mythology of the moment overwhelmed the Scriptural expression of need and Savior, sin and redemption, hell and heaven. The worst evil was that which inhibited or put value judgments on those thoughts, emotions, and desires. The best good was that which allow those thoughts, emotions, and desires to flourish unhindered by challenge or what others think — much less God. Authenticity was to the self and the self-authenticating self desired and accepted approval only and nothing less.
When even conservatives stopped speaking of sin or of the evils of sin and began accepting brokenness and pain and disappointment as primary, we became mere puppets of the culture and weak echoes of what everybody already knew and believed. Who needs heaven when you can expect it or find it on earth and who needs a Savior when the worst sin is not living by your unfettered desires and wants? We ended up trying to sell the need for God in ways that made sin a sideline and the world loved it. That is why there are so few churches and preachers speaking about sin and death, forgiveness and life, in the same terms as Scripture and why the substitutionary atonement model of salvation became a pariah to the pulpit as well as to the modern mind. Lets admit it. We all joined on the moralistic therapeutic deism model in some way or another and now we have to dig ourselves out of it before nothing of the real Gospel remains.
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