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.The “purpose” talk at Saddleback paralleled President George W.Bush’s frequent but nebulous references to God’s plan, which one critic derided as “mostly atmospherics,” devoid of any theologicalsubstance.11Warren’s purpose-driven movement represented the triumph of a style pioneered by evangelists such as Dwight L.Moody (1837–1899), who also Church sign in Hickory, N.C.Photograph by Theodore J.Thuesen (2006).214Predestinationsplit the Calvinist-Arminian difference for the sake of converting the greatest number of souls.Moody’s was an “uncomplicated soteriology,” as one his-torian has put it, designed to cater to both sides.12 Among more doctrinallyminded conservatives, this reluctance to take sides would always smack of reductionism—a lowest-common-denominator mentality that seemed to deny the Bible itself.One of Moody’s own lieutenants, Reuben A.Torrey, branded some of his fellow evangelicals as cowards because of their aversion to doctrinal confl ict.Christ and his disciples, Torrey insisted, “immediately attacked, exposed and denounced error.” 13 Similarly, The Purpose-Driven Life has spawned a small industry of rebuttals by evangelicals charging that Warren betrayed the uncompromising truths of scripture.Minneapolis pastor Bob DeWaay, for example, has criticized Warren’s selective use of biblical paraphrases for passages such as Ephesians 1:11.In DeWaay’s view, Warren substituted “the uninspired ideas of a man” for the hard predestinarian doctrines actually contained in the biblical text.Warren’s “gospel is inof-fensive, attractive, winsome, popular, and easy to believe,” DeWaay notes.“The gospel of the Bible is offensive and hard to believe.It is a narrow gate and narrow path with few adherents.” 14 Meanwhile, Pennsylvania pastor Marshall Davis has accused Warren of ignoring the Southern Baptist confessional standard, the Baptist Faith and Message.Saddleback’s own statement of faith, according to Davis, waters down traditional doctrinal language, communicating instead “that there are lots of different theological opinions, and it really doesn’t matter what we think because we cannot comprehend it anyway.” 15Such criticisms belie Warren’s own professed admiration for a fundamentalist stalwart who was anything but weak-kneed on doctrine.As a college student in the mid-1970s, Warren once drove 350 miles to hear W.A.Criswell, pastor of Dallas’s First Baptist Church (then the nation’s largest Southern Baptist congregation), address a convention in San Francisco.After the sermon, when Warren went up to shake Criswell’s hand, the fi ery evangelist unexpect-edly placed his hands on Warren’s head and prayed, “Father, I ask that you give this young preacher a double portion of your Spirit.May the church he pastors grow to twice the size of the Dallas church.” Warren later called Criswell the “greatest American pastor of the twentieth century,” but he emulated him only in bringing in the numbers.At Saddleback, there were no echoes of Criswell’s militant defense of Calvinism.16What, then, are we to conclude about the providence-without-predestination espoused at many megachurches today? Does Saddleback portend the death of doctrine—the fi nal dumbing down of religion in an age of sound bites and instant messaging? Such a judgment is probably premature.As we saw in chapter 6, the technologies of the Internet age have Epilogue215fueled the growth of neo-confessional movements dedicated to recovering the predestinarian perspectives of the Reformation era.The Internet has also revived a measure of the bitterness and gall of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century controversies, as seen in recent charges of “Calvinist jihad”in the Southern Baptist blogs.One might fault Rick Warren for doctrinal fuzziness but one can hardly blame him for steering clear of such poisonous rhetoric.It is not primarily confessional precision that has been lost in the cultural transition from the Puritans to Warren.Outside of Saddleback, zealous Arminians and Calvinists are still to be found, and confessionalists of other stripes still thrive in some quarters.What has declined for many Christians in the modern United States, however, is the mystical dimension of their experience of divine grace.This erosion of mystery happened in two ways.First, the preoccupation with predestination weakened the hold of sacramental mystery over the Christian imagination.To the extent that Americans emphasized the immemorial decree of God’s electing choice, the grace offered here and now through the sacraments was correspondingly deemphasized, despite what some predestinarians have claimed.High-church defenders of sacramental regeneration and the real presence have always recognized this correlation: witness the Laudians’ intense hostility towardrigid predestinarians in Caroline England.17 To be sure, there are exceptions to this general rule.Missouri Synod Lutherans, for example, were adamant defenders of the real presence even while insisting on Luther’s unfl inching doctrine of unconditional election.Yet even so, the Lutheran controversy over precise predestinarian formulas always threatened to erode the more mystical confi dence in the sacraments that was characteristic of Luther himself.In the more natively anti-sacramental culture of American evangelicalism, predestination’s corrosive effect was much starker.During the colonial period, as Arminians and Calvinists slugged it out over whether election was conditional, both sides came to prize what historian Randall Balmer has called “an instantaneous, datable experience of grace akin to St.Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus.” 18 Consequently, religious experience in the infant evangelical movement was between the believer and the electing God; churchly intermediaries and liturgies rarely intervened.The same outlook, only without the old doctrinal debates, has been passed down into the modern megachurch.Thus, when Rick Warren abandoned Criswell’s card-carrying Calvinism, there were no sacraments or rituals to take the place of sharply defi ned doctrines.The poet Robert Lowell once wrote of the contrasting religious styles of sacramental Catholics and predestinarian Calvinists.His oversimplifi cation contained an important kernel of truth: 216Predestination“Catholicism notices things, the particular, while Calvinism studies theattenuated ideal.”19 A high-church critic might well conclude that in the predestinarian progression from the Reformation to the megachurch, the sacramental substance of Christianity attenuated to almost nothing.Second, predestinarian controversies contributed to the decline of dogmatic mystery.In fi ghting so strenuously for particular doctrines of grace, the various contending denominations turned predestination into something logical and rational, unwittingly depriving grace of the miraculous all-suffi ciency they were trying to preserve.This effect was particularly evident in America, where the Reformation and the Enlightenment profoundly shaped theological debates
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