The origin of modern unbelief?

“The natural parents of modern unbelief turn out to have been the guardians of belief... Many thinking people came at last to realize that it was religion, not science or social change that gave birth to unbelief.

Having made God more and more like man - intellectually, morally, emotionally - the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man.

In trying to adapt their religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science, the defenders of God slowly strangled Him. 

If anyone is to be arraigned, if anyone is to be arraigned for deicide, it is not Charles Darwin, but his famous adversary Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, not the godless Robert Ingersoll but the godly Beecher family." (James Turner - "Without God, Without Creed: the Origin of Unbelief in America”. Turner is a Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame).

Mm...I wonder, if there were a modern day equivalent here, who would be the usual suspect? In other words, should we arraign some of our megachurch preachers to face the charge of deicide? And if deicide is too strong a word, try distortion of the truth for size?

Taking Turner’s strident cue above, should we arraign the perennially amiable Joel Osteen for preaching the prosperity gospel without reservation, and not the atheist extraordinaire Dr Richard Dawkins for writing the book “The God Delusion” without compunction? 

Or should we arraign the impeccably coiffured Joseph Prince for promoting a grace so radical that it risks turning the success of the gospel into the gospel of success, and not Sam Harris or the late Christopher Hitchens who once condemned religion as the poison of civilisation? 

How about the other wealthy American preachers like Benny Hinn, Joyce Meyer, Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar and Randy and Paula White who are under federal/senate investigation for tax accountability? 

And while we are at it, we should never leave the offending Catholic priests, bishops and even the past pope out for perpetrating and/or concealing sexual abuses of young boys, and most recently, nuns? 

I believe that was the essence of Turner’s point when he said that we “the shapers of religion made it feasible to abandon God, to believe simply in man”. I guess the greatest threat to one’s religion is not irreligion, but the religion of adapting Christ to men and not men to Christ. 

That is also why Acts talked about “(being) in Him we live and move and have our being” and not the other way round where “(being) in us He lives and moves and have His being.” The difference is subtle but no less significant. 

The former is our moving towards Him like what Mary did when she rushed over to the feet of Jesus. The latter is about engineering an environment that invites Jesus to move around us, raising the hair in our back, but seldom doing a deep work within us, that is, raising the dead spirit to walk on Calvary’s track (aka the Marthas of obsessive preparation).

Alas, Bonhoeffer was right when he wrote about “religionless Christianity” where he explained:-

“What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience - and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving towards a completely religionless time, people as they are now simply cannot be religious any more. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious””.

Does Bonhoeffer have a point? Who are we, anyway? What have we become? 

Do the people out there recognize the faith we profess with our lips more than the faith we exemplify in our lives? Are we doing our belief a disservice by rushing in busloads to sermons that pander after the cultural desires of our time and not the countercultural mandate of another time, a time whose values are timeless?

Where is the long obedience in the same direction that the late Eugene Peterson talked about? He wrote: “The essential thing “in heaven and earth” is...that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living.” 

Mind you, that quote was taken from the firebrand atheist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who heralded the death of God in his time because he saw with his own eyes what the great usurpation of modern man has done to religion, that is, making God more and more like man - intellectually, morally and emotionally (He was also the one who said that the last Christian died on the Cross).

Look at the landscape around you, and you will notice how we have freely, even unknowingly, appropriated/adapted the culture of our time into the church of our supposed timeless Saviour. Some churches have done just that. Pastor Steven J Lawson describes it best here: -

"As the church advances into the twenty-first century, the stress to produce booming ministries has never been greater. Influenced by corporate mergers, towering skyscrapers, and expanding economies, bigger is perceived as better, and nowhere is this "Well Street" mentality more evident than in the church.

A new way of "doing" church is emerging. In this radical paradigm shift, exposition is being replaced with entertainment, preaching with performances, doctrine with drama, and theology with theatrics. The pulpit, once the focal point of the church, is now being overshadowed by a variety of church-growth techniques, everything from trendy worship styles to glitzy presentations to vaudeville-like pageantries. 

In seeking to capture the upper hand in church growth, a new wave of pastors is reinventing the church and repackaging the gospel into a product to be sold for "consumers"".

While I understand that "every generation must seek to translate the faith into the contemporary idiom" (as the late John Scott puts it), in order "to relate the unchanging Word to a changing world", but "a translation is a rendering of the same message into another language; it is not a fresh composition." 

And to me, it is certainly not a culturally biased "composition" whereby the temptation is to put a new, refreshing spin on the character of God, which is mostly a lop-sided view to cater only to the masses. The prosperity gospel script as one example out of many ought to be rather familiar to us by now. 

Is our god rich? Is our god disease free? Is god living the good life? Is our god successful by worldly standards? Is our god all powerful, famous and influential? 

Now, of course, if he is God, he is all that. It’s biblical right? What’s your point Mike? 

My point is that such a god runs the risk of being no different from the Trumps of our time. It runs the risk of being no different from the Bezos, Gates, Ambanis, Kuoks, and the oracles of omaha of our time. And let me illustrate this with a recent encounter.

At one point in my CNY visit, a group of Christians told me to accept that Trump may be appointed by God just as Nebuchadnezzar and Hitler (and some donkey I think) were divinely elected, if not quietly permitted. Yes, you heard it right, Hitler too.

Now, if you take God’s sovereignty into account, they are not wrong about divine election or permissiveness - though still debatable. But, I shall reserve my opinion on that. 

What however concerns me is when one of them at the dinner table told me that by virtue of Trump’s presidency, he cannot be anything but God’s elect. In other words, the office confirms the divine election. That made me think…

Is that the Christian’s benchmark of what is of God and what is not of God? Are powerful offices, great influence, fame and/or fortune unmissable signs of God’s elect? Can we no longer think of God as someone who once told Pilate that His kingdom is not of this world...but is from another place? Can we not imagine for a moment that His kingdom is not one born of an acquisitive agenda, but one that goes beyond that, to a yearning beyond the material?     

Not that there is anything wrong with being rich or a billionaire, or as Howard Schultz calls himself “people of means”, who are incidentally famous and powerful, politically and socially. But what is disconcerting for me is when that becomes the main emphasis, or a much sought after criteria to judge or single out unimpeachable spiritual leadership or signs of spiritual growth.

In my view, this not only risks causing us to misattribute, but it also causes us to fall into what Turner meant when he wrote, “having made God more and more like man - intellectually (a doctrinally capitalist mindset), morally (a justification of the material creed as enlightened values of our time) and emotionally (a superficial validation premised on human sentiments)”.

At some point, starting in the spirit and losing our way in the flesh, we turn our God on the Cross into a god of our culture, or our Saviour nailed into our saviour enriched. The suffering Christ, and the fruit of the Spirit that such suffering brings out eventually, becomes subsumed into a wealthy Christ, whose hallmarks of spiritual growth are prosperity, fame and power. 

We thus make God into our own images. We make Him into what we think he ought to be – not just personable, but just like us in the full regalia of opulence, affability and enlightenment.

Surely, being rich in God has to go beyond being rich in ourselves in order for us to be enduring imitators of Christ, right? Because, if you think about it, the issue of our faith has never been about wealth. There is more to it than an acquisitive agenda remember? Yet, we have somehow made wealth the issue of our faith. We have made it its centrality.

Wealth/power and godliness are not mutually exclusive, but it is neither a condition precedent right? (that is, must wealth/power exist before we can qualify as true believers?)

For even Benny Hinn himself had recently admitted to how megachurch preachers have taken things too far with the prosperity gospel. 

He said: “We get attacked for preaching prosperity, well it’s in the Bible. But I think some have gone to the extreme with it sadly, and it’s not God’s word what is taught, and I think I’m as guilty as others...Today, the idea is abundance and palatial homes and cars and bank accounts. The focus is wrong … It’s so wrong.”

After all’s said, I return to this searching question, have we adapted our “religious beliefs to socioeconomic change, to new moral challenges, to novel problems of knowledge, to the tightening standards of science” to such an extent that we as “the defenders of God” have “slowly strangled Him?” 

I know this is never a popular Sunday morning message, and some may call it a polemical clickbait for attention. But even if you disagree with Turner’s quote or what I have written above, surely there ought to be some remnants of both expressions here that cause you to pause and reflect about how some of us are guilty of recalibrating the gospel, adapting it to the culture of our time, and thereby craftily deviating from the Truth, yet only slightly, but the cumulative effect of which is an emerging trend bordering on perilous deformation or malformation of the Truth.

Food for thought? 

Alas, let me end this post with Bonhoeffer’s own incisive words.

“But to deviate from the truth for the sake of some prospect of our own can never be wise, however slight that deviation may be. It is not our judgment of the situation which can show us what is wise, but only the truth of the Word of God. Here alone lies the promise of God’s faithfulness and help. It will always be true that the wisest course for the disciple is always to abide solely by the Word of God in all simplicity.”

Amen. Have a reflective Sunday. 

Crossover to Calvary.

When Chew Eng Han told the press that he has run out of options for his appeal, I empathised and believed him.

Apparently, it is the end of the road for him. At some point, he has to resign to his fate as he had exhausted all avenues of appeal and review, that is, short of petitioning to the President for a pardon equivalent to the one usually asked for by a convict facing the gallows.

To rub salt into the wound, this week, on Thursday, he got a earful from the Apex Court of three senior judges. Not only was his application to challenge his conviction and sentence applied out of time, it was also "plainly abusive" and utterly lacking in merit – so said the judges.

They were unanimous on the fact that the "offences of criminal breach of trust and falsification of accounts were satisfied". They also endorsed the decision of the court below on their finding that the actus reus of misappropriation and the mens rea of dishonesty have all been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

In other words, all the accused in the Apex Court’s opinion had "acted with dishonest intention to cause wrongful loss to the church even though they were not motivated by personal gain."

However, Eng Han could not reconcile himself to the verdict and sentence. He said, “I’m just not happy. I am not happy with the reasons offered by the judges.”

The main thrust of his appeal is that he did it all for the church, and he had gained nothing from it. Not even a single cent.

In his appeal, he highlighted this point: "a new precedent has been judicially pronounced, whereby a person can be convicted for misappropriation...even where that person has not used property for himself or a third party, and in spite of him having applied the property for the owner's (unauthorised) use."

And by owner, he meant the church. More specifically, he meant the church leadership, or his former spiritual mentor, Kong Hee. The corollary of his point is this: Why should the sins of the leadership be passed down to his faithful members, who had profited nothing from it and only wanted nothing but to see the church prosper as a whole?

This is the part that Eng Han could not let go, and understandably so. He just could not accept that his actions, motivated by an enduring sense of piety, loyalty and sincerity to the calling of the church leadership, could have been deemed as an act of criminal misappropriation - or worse, punishable by the law with imprisonment. How could something so right then end up so wrong now?

In fact, Eng Han once said that he had attended two of Sun's concerts and believed "100 per cent" in the crossover’s cultural mandate. "The logic is Sun becomes a megastar, (holds more) concerts ... then she can evangelise,” he told Channel News Asia last year.

To him, the end goal of evangelism just had to justify the means, however extravagant, because how do you ever put a monetary price on a lost soul returning to the Lord’s flock?

From a very vulnerable human standpoint, Eng Han had every emotional reason to feel aggrieved, betrayed and wronged for he had done all that was asked of him all that time believing wholeheartedly that the leadership was God-led, the crossover project was God's will and the money pouring in was God-sent.

But the reality was far removed from what Eng Han had once believed about his ex-church being the "ultimate church", and by extension of that logic, the leadership of that ultimate church was beyond reproach and also unquestionable.

In fact, while the other accused had surrendered themselves, Eng Han is the only one left standing fighting alone for his innocence because he did it all for the church and his conscience is clear. If anything, for him, it was an act of personal sacrifice and definitely not a criminal enterprise he was charged and guilty of - not even by a long shot.

Altogether, he had given nearly a million dollars of his own money to the church and the crossover project. He in fact joined the thousands of members, former and existing, who had given of their time, effort and money unquestionably to the church leaders, believing at that time that it was the right thing to do. They were so sure it was what God had commanded.

However, when asked by Justice Chan last year whether he was brainwashed, Eng Han admitted he was. He further admitted that he was once sold to the idea pitched by Kong Hee that Sun Ho would be more popular than Jay Chou, S.H.E. and even the late Whitney Houston.

At that time, he thought to himself, “If she was touted to be the next Whitney Houston, how would she not be a profitable commercial vehicle for us?”

Alas, neither being brainwashed, sacrificing for the church leadership nor doing it not for personal gain was enough to exculpate Eng Han from the convicted intention to use unauthorised building funds to transform Sun Ho into an international superstar, evangelism notwithstanding.

In other words, his motive (on the “why” he did it, that is, purely for the church) did not in the court’s view absolve him from his intentional act (on the “how” it was done, that is, the illegal modus operandi of the act involving proven misappropriation and falsification). So, one’s end (or goal) may be noble, but his means (or methods) are deemed by the penal code criminal. In his case, the gap between motive (purpose) and intent (element of the offence) could not have been more different.

And after all is said and done, even Eng Han would have to admit that his faith and loyalty had sadly fallen squarely on man’s leadership, not God’s. This is something we all have to take note of because we are all equally vulnerable.

For the logic of the crossover may have appeared obvious to Eng Han and many at that time, that is, the elevation of one commercial brand to bring all to Christ. But it was still a man-funded elevation banking on the misled hope that such heavily invested worldly attraction would set the platform for a mass spiritual conversion thereafter. The strange logic is to make one popular so as to make Jesus even more popular - yet, such matching popularity runs the risk of competing allegiance and misattribution. 

And this is evident in an email in January 2005 written by Kong Hee concerning his wife: “I need our members to be super proud of her and realise that we do have a singing diva in our midst”.

Alas, I do not deny that at one time, his wife was indeed a singing diva with fans all over Asia. Her influence then was unassailable, and her words from any pulpit would have been deeply influential. That was the high-water mark of her so-called elevated spiritual platform. I am sure then that Kong Hee got his wish - his church was "super proud" of his wife.

But sadly, that was never enough... 

What started off in the spirit often ends up in the flesh and this was where all noble goals went awry with China Wine. The latter was the beginning of the inebriated fall.

The sad drunken tale of this spirited ambition has been repeated ad infinitum in the history of man's rise and fall. For Jesus needed neither a megastar nor singing diva to bring him to the fore - he just needed an empty vessel with a humble and willing heart.

As such, the pastoral couple would not be the first to start off on the narrow way, which somehow unwittingly broadens out of control under their leadership, and neither will they be the last.

At this point, we are all reminded that the way of grief takes one to Calvary; it is the road of self-sacrifice. But the way of man draws him to his own revelry; it is a road of self-elevation.

And now that the dust has nearly settled in this unwieldy saga, it is hoped that we as Christians will be able to see clearer, deeper and further into what is written in Proverbs 19: 21: "Many are the plans in a person's heart, but it is the Lord's purpose that prevails."

And what ultimately prevailed in the brief existence of the crossover is the call for the redemption of humanity, regardless of whether you are a layperson or a megachurch pastor.

For salvation still belongs to the Lord, and the only crossover that truly matters for all time is still the crossover to Calvary. Cheerz.