Dear friends,
In this first episode of our series of topics, Peter and I are discussing institutional captivity. Christians, especially evangelical Christians, have been very enterprising and energetic in setting up Christian organisations and institutions. But sadly, we have not been as good in maintaining their focus or original intention. So many of our organisations have lost their way even to the extent of excluding evangelicalism. In our conversation we try to explore why and how this takes place. It’s a large topic which hopefully will lead to many discussions amongst our listeners.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip: In today’s episode, we will be exploring the topic of ‘losing our way’, because there is a whole string of historical examples in which Christian people and Christian institutions have drifted from their original purpose. How do we guard the faith when it comes to Christian organisations?
Peter: This issue can be summed up through the “Who, What, Why, How” framework. But my point is that there are quite a number of organisations—particularly those which are educational and charitable—which had been founded by reformed and evangelical Christians, inspired by God’s grace; but they have drifted over the years, becoming very liberal in their theology or even completely secular. I’m not saying they don’t do good work. I’m sure many of them do, but they’re not working explicitly for Christ and witnessing to him. That is a sadness and a problem. I thought we should discuss why this happens, and what can be done to retain the integrity of such organisations set up by evangelical Christians.
Phillip: I think immediately of the YMCA and the YWCA. Like you say, they do many good things, but the kind of evangelism that was there no longer takes place. Then there’s the Benevolent Society. The Australian Mutual Provident Society also has a Christian foundation.
There are also certain denominations to which this applies, such as the Uniting Church of Australia. Excuse me for saying this to those who are still members of it and faithful to the Lord Jesus, but the Congregationalism of Cromwell, the Presbyterianism of Calvinism, the Wesleyan Methodists—none of them would recognise the Uniting Church of Australia today. It is preaching completely different doctrines than the 3 denominations that gave rise to the Uniting Church.
It happens also with secular institutions. The original University of Sydney Act in 1850 stated the explicit goal of “better advancement of religion and morality,”1 while at the same time prohibiting any religious tests for students or staff because of denominationalism. But with all due respect to those who now teach, educate, and research at the University of Sydney, my experience is they are not in any way pursuing the “better advancement of religion and morality.” That is just not part of their core business anymore, even though that’s what it was set up for.
Peter: Many years ago, I read an excellent book by George Marsden called The Soul of the American University,2 in which he explores, I believe, 9 different great universities in the United States, from Yale and Harvard to Boston and so forth. He found that by the end of the 20th century and certainly into the 21st, these universities have fairly explicitly moved away from that Christian foundation. This is something that started happening in the 19th century, but it happened more and more during the 20th century. But even if you went back to the 1940s or ‘50s, you’d find it to be more Christian than it now is.
Phillip: Harvard University, if I remember correctly, was founded out of Emmanuel College in Cambridge and was set up to train Puritan ministers. I can’t imagine that any Puritan church would want ministers from Harvard University now. It’s a university that teaches everything and anything other than Puritan theology. I don’t think Emmanuel College is all that much better, I may say.
Peter: If I remember correctly, the motto of Harvard is “Veritas” meaning ‘Truth,’ but it was originally a quote from Jesus in John 8:32, “The truth will set you free.” In that context, the truth that will set you free is his words. Now compare that to Evergreen State College, a university which was founded in the United States in the 1960s, whose motto is, “Let it all hang out.”
Closer to home though, you mentioned the Benevolent Society, which continues to do great work. But it was founded by a group of Christians, including one of our ancestors, Mr. William Pascoe Crook, in 1813. But today, it appears to be quite secular. It’s certainly drifted from where it started.
Phillip: The Red Cross was also founded by Christians. But when you read the history of the Red Cross, they’ve censored the Christian influence of the very people who founded it.
Peter: There are many examples of this exact thing. You mentioned YMCA and YWCA. I just saw something recently on the website of YWCA Canberra which said that in 2009, the decision was made for the organisation to be secular, with the aim of being thoroughly inclusive. It embraces all people: Muslims, gay people, and so forth. It wants to be inclusive.
Phillip: So did the originators of the YMCA and YWCA. They’d include everybody under the name of Christian outreach.
Peter: Yes, but that’s not part of the agenda today. Another example that sticks in my mind is that of Princeton Seminary, which today is one of the great seminaries of the world. It’s quite liberal in its theology these days, which is astonishing because in the 19th century, it was known throughout the world for its ‘old school’ Presbyterian theology. Some of the great names of authors—Hodge, B.B. Warfield, Machen—came from that school, which was founded in 1812. By 1913 and 1923, it was beginning to change; the Presbyterian denomination had changed under the impact of critical liberalism. The great problem was not so much caused by an immediate takeover by liberal Christians, but of evangelical Christians coming to power, wishing to include everybody, and so including liberals on the faculty and so forth.
The step towards liberalism came in 2 stages. The first was the desire of the evangelicals to include everybody; then there was the liberal takeover as these very same evangelicals were excluded. They were called fundamentalists, and they weren’t allowed to go on. So they would include missionary societies, some of which have turned into benevolent societies. That’s all right; they do good, but they’re not preaching the gospel. They’re not fulfilling the original task for which they were set up.
Phillip: But they are taking the money of the originators who set them up.
Peter: That was one of the problems in Princeton, because a fair bit of money had been given by people who explicitly wanted old school Presbyterianism to continue to be taught. I don’t know how that was handled, but why does this happen, in your opinion?
Phillip: We have to see that there’s a whole study of what is called ‘institutional capture’, which happens in the non-Christian world as well. Political parties set up for one reason get taken over by people who have a different agenda, and they change it. There are studies which show the steps that facilitate this. First, the people who start these institutions have a clear vision as to what they’re doing. But 2, 3, 4 generations down, that clear vision has been dulled or changed. You can see it in the warnings of Jesus in Revelation chapters 2 and 3, when he speaks so forcefully to the 7 churches, calling upon people to remain faithful to the very cause of the gospel in the first place. You could see this failure to remain faithful in all kinds of factors in our society.
If you look at the religious issue, there’s firstly the dominance and imposition of the secular world. That’s the external pressure that comes upon us. The Australian Broadcasting Commission used to have a 5-minute Bible reading every day of the week. When the television started, it used to finish about 11 o’clock at night with a 15-minute devotional from one of our bishops. It’s almost unimaginable that that would be done today; the ABC often speaks negatively on religion. The Sydney Morning Herald, the other day, had an article on the Presbyterians. I was astonished; when was the last time our daily newspaper wrote anything about the Presbyterians? So I immediately turned to the article, only to find that it wasn’t about the Presbyterians; it was about feminism. In particular, it was about what the Presbyterians were doing was wrong regarding feminism. It didn’t even get a quote from the Presbyterians. So though there is this organisation that has operated in Australia for hundreds of years, and still has thousands of people attending every week, they don’t count in the paper. That’s censorship at work.
You also see it in things like social work and education, both of which were founded in Australia by Christians. But now, social workers are not allowed to say that they’re Christian. They’re not allowed to put up Christian signs inside their counselling rooms. The secular takeover of the discipline has removed Christianity from the practice which was founded by Christians. The same thing happens in education, and in medicine.
There have been changes in the law on the subjects of abortion and euthanasia. We live in a democracy; laws can be changed. But what happens to the doctors and nurses who do not believe it is right to conduct the abortions and voluntary assisted suicides that they are being directed to do? Our government is struggling with this issue of the obligation of the professional doctor or nurse to give advice to their patients on this subject over which the Christian has great reservations. There are many pressures in our society upon Christians, and the response we give is very often wrong. That is, we get captured. We get captured in our mind, our policies and our practices by the secular world.
When evangelism becomes apologetics, then soon, apologetics turns into accommodation. The aim of apologetics is to try to show that the gospel is somehow consistent with the worldview of the secular society. Evangelism, however, is about proclaiming the truth of God in the Lord Jesus Christ. If it relates to society today, it’s polemics, not apologetics; evangelism shows what’s wrong with society today, rather than reshaping Christianity to fit in with society. But we have this institutional accommodation reaching the point where to stay in the game of life in our society, we must run an educational syllabus that fits in with the world. You can’t teach the Reformation anymore in our public schools; you must teach the Enlightenment. The syllabus of the books that you will set in your English department has been changed. You can’t teach as a previous generation would have done. Though of course, it was not all perfect back in the days of yore. It was awful in many ways. But the secular world has brought terrific pressure on our institutions and individuals in the institutions to accommodate it.
Peter: There’s an issue which I will mention, but we won’t go into it today. Many of our great institutions are also funded by the government. Where money goes, so power goes as well, if you’re not careful. But that’s something for people to think about. I’m not sure what to do about it. Certainly I’ve been chairing institutions that have accepted money from the government, rightly or not. There are external pressures that may make an institution wish to go in a particular direction, but there are internal reasons as well.
Phillip: Did you ever read that book by Harry Blamires called The Christian Mind?3
Peter: I did. It was very exciting at the time, and I can remember almost nothing about it. But it’s a good book.
Phillip: Blamires was a lecturer in a college in England, which trained people to teach in church schools. But he found that the syllabus, the students, and the whole program had been undermined by false teaching. So the first half of the book is a great blast at the ways in which humanistic thinking had undermined the whole process of training teachers. That’s what happens to us in each generation. That is, when we embrace the philosophy of the day and try to show how it is consistent with the Christian truth, we reshape Christianity. We did it in the early centuries with Platonism, with the Aristotelian arrival, and with Saint Thomas Aquinas. We did it with the Enlightenment. We now see people trying to do it with postmodernity. So what comes about is the issue of half-truths. The half-truths of our society today—feminism, social justice, relief for the poor—replace, reshape, or reform the gospel. Christians must be concerned for justice, but the social justice warriors have a view of justice that is different to the Christian. So to get into bed with them on issues, you wind up changing the gospel. The difficult people are the unreliable leaders, not the heretics. The people who deny the resurrection of Jesus, deny the truth of his death on the cross for our sins—they don’t worry us. The Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t worry us. It’s the accommodationists: the people who will speak the gospel truths, the grace of God and the like, but change the message. I see it in the pop psychology Christians of the United States, where the gospel ceases to be about the Lord Jesus Christ and becomes much more about the individual’s psychological state of wellbeing.
Peter: A great deal of this has to do with an inadequate doctrine of sin. Non-Christian anthropology takes over and then infiltrates Christian thinking, which is tragic.
Phillip: Over and over again, I’ve been told by people, “You’ve got to stop talking about sin, and justice, and judgement, because it’ll turn people off the church. If you want to attract people today, you’ve got to speak of love, and kindness, and gentleness, and the open inclusion of everybody.” I’m sorry, but that is not to preach the gospel. Even though there are great truths in the love, kindness, and gentleness in the truth of God, it’s the half-truth.
Peter: You can’t really understand the grace of God without understanding sin and judgement. I was talking to some young people the other day who had studied psychology and social work at university. I asked, “Does the subject of sin ever come up?” They looked startled, and said, “No.”
Phillip: It’s a fundamental failure of the universities. G.K. Chesterton pointed out in one of his essays that the function of a historian is to explain why people are as sinful as they are. They should ask, “Why do communities make so many bad decisions?” But no one writes history in terms of sin today. That’s not allowed. You even find it hard to have people doing courses on lying. That’s one of the few universals of human nature, to tell lies, but somehow we think we can have the study of humanities without reference to lies and lying.
Peter: I heard of a magistrate the other day who said to a friend of mine that it was so hard to do this job; every person who appeared before them was telling lies.
The question we’re asking is this: why do great institutions founded on Christian principles, often by evangelical Christians, slip away in time? So far, we’ve talked about the water we’re swimming in, the external reasons why the powers that rule in society capture the hearts of Christians. Then there are the internal reasons: the ways in which we embrace half-truths and replace the gospel with them. I’m very sympathetic about this because as I said, I have chaired some important organisations. When an organisation is doing great work and succeeds, it gets a lot of support and it grows. Then comes the question of who you employ.
It’s all very well to say, “You ought to employ only Christians,” but if you did that, the organisation would never grow and never do the job that you want it to do. So there’s this difficult issue of who works for an organisation.
I began by talking about the ‘who’, ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’; I believe that boards, CEOs and others become obsessed with asking, “What are we, and how can we do the job?” These are important questions, but the ‘who’ doesn’t just concern who we are as an organisation. It pertains to other questions which begin to be forgotten:
Who are the people actually making the decisions? Who are the people who will remind us why the organisation was set up? What is its real underlying function? Who will remind us of things like evangelism when we’re in danger of forgetting them?
It is important to prioritise hiring the right people, who will have these things dominant in their heads, in a way which means that they won’t go down certain paths. Though it is painful not to employ certain people, it is important to ensure that the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ can reflect the true reason for the organisation.
Phillip: Yes, it’s got to do with the personnel, because they shape and direct wherever the institutions are going. But sometimes, the choices we make create problems down the track. The Prime Minister of Australia, back in 2013, made a decision to change the definition of men and women. This has created terrible problems as we’ve tried to figure out what to do. In response, she has said, in essence, “Well, we didn’t know or consider the consequences of those decisions,” which many of us are finding very difficult to believe. Because of course, our decisions have consequences.
Take Japanese teaching. Say you have a Christian school, and you want to provide the education necessary for society, and Japanese is a good subject to teach. But you have to consider, “How many Christian Japanese teachers are in Sydney?” I think it’s a very small number. So if we start up a Japanese class with a Christian teacher, and he or she leaves, will we be able to replace the Christian teaching Japanese? Most likely not. But we can’t now stop the Japanese classes because the students are committed to them. Their educational process is committed to them. So what do we do? We employ a non-Christian Japanese teacher. But the non-Christian Japanese teacher has as much right as a teacher as any other teacher in the school, and they can put forward their view as much as anybody else can. When you make those kinds of decisions over many years and across lots of different subjects, the school changes its flavour and its character. It may be that we have to consider why we are doing it, and who we want to employ. This means we won’t be able to offer certain subjects for people, and we won’t be able to do certain things because we have a higher value system than just providing the breadth of education that is available.
Peter: Yes, there’s a discussion to be had there. But there are times when organisations have grown to such a size that they have no alternative. Then the ‘who’ and the ‘why’ has more to do with the leadership at that point above all. The whole issue is not simple. But I do know that unless the leadership reflects the original desire and commitment of the organisation—or better still, reflects the Word of God, the priority of the gospel and the good works that flow from it—then we lose it. You can appoint Christians to those things, but not all Christians understand the priority of the gospel and the significance of being firm for the gospel.
Phillip: Yes. This even affects churches and denominations. Theological education is so important, but the pressure to fill pulpits can lower the standards of the theological education of the clergy who will run the churches.
Peter: Indeed. So what’s the remedy?
I think of 1 Corinthians 16:13, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.”
Phillip: Yes. That is, stand firm in speech and in fellowship. But people—the ‘who’—are crucial. Therefore the greatest care needs to be made in appointments; the people you’re appointing to tasks must share the beliefs and vision of the founders. Howard Mowll, one of our previous Archbishops, was reputed as not always filling jobs because he’d rather wait until he had the right person than fill a job with the wrong person. This frustrated people because there were jobs which were not filled. But he would not act quickly. At least, that’s the tradition I was raised on.
Peter: True or not, it also reminds me of his time at Cambridge University where he fought a terrific battle over gospel integrity with the Cambridge Intercollegiate Christian Union against the Student Christian Movement of the time. It’s not that the SCM was saying, “You can’t be a member if you believe in penal substitution.” It was saying, “We’ve got to have space for everybody here.” Whereas he and others stood for the truth, though it was extremely costly in terms of reputation, for he faced vigorous opposition. To stand for the truth is a costly business.
Phillip: This is partly because when you move to appointments, you wind up in politics. There’s nothing wrong with politics if they’re good politics, but this is where it becomes unpleasant in the reactions that people have. “You’re appointing on the wrong basis,” they will say. You’re overlooking people, but you are doing so for the right reasons. More important than this tricky business, though, is fostering the next generation. You have a problem today if you didn’t make sure yesterday that you were recruiting and training the next generation. Putting your efforts into training the next generation is fundamental to having enough candidates to do the task of following and sharing the beliefs and visions of the founders. So we really do need to invest in the next generation of leaders for the task of leadership that will come 10, 20, 30 years down the track.
Peter: There is, of course, one potential problem with the view which we are taking, which we are unashamed to take. In a political world, when you’re taking a particular view, you can become a very small minority and then become more or less a sect within the world. You can be so rigorous as to exclude people who would be suitable. We all need to be cautious while we’re being strong as well.
Phillip: There are certain key elements to avoiding this. That is, when a church is only filled with the descendants with the same family name, that’s a problem. When all the education is only within the sect, I think there is a problem. You must listen to alternatives. It’s an important part of knowing the truth that you do not self-censor. Our society is terribly censorious, and will not listen to alternatives. But an important part of knowing the truth is hearing the lies. So it’s important that the people who are to be trained in leadership are trained not only in what we believe in the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, but that they understand and can appreciate the alternatives.
I went to one church where you could go to daycare, kindergarten, the primary school, and the high school all on the church property. When you finished there, you could go to a university that was owned and run by the church. When you finished university, you returned to the seminary, which was back on the church property. So you could go from ages 0–25 through 2 university degrees without ever leaving that particular congregation. That gave me the creeps.
Peter: Yes. That’s not what we are talking about.
Phillip: You have degrees from Oxford and from Sydney University which were not teaching you evangelical faith.
Peter: No. That is why I’ve always hoped that our public school system would remain, and be good enough for me in the old days to send my children to. There are people who can’t afford to send their children to private schools, even low fee-paying private schools. We need to have a system, and we need to have people who will stand firm, but who can hear what the world is saying and live in that world.
The other thing that Paul mentions in that little section in 1 Corinthians 16 is love. You must love the people who have a very different point of view, so that you can explain their point of view better than they can, and then say why you disagree with it. We’re not into nastiness; we are trying to be witnesses for Jesus who showed his grace for us.
Phillip: And to include all peoples into the Kingdom of God.
The University of Sydney (1850). An Act To Incorporate And Endow The University Of Sydney. University of Sydney Archives, REF-00049346.
George M. Marsden, The Soul of the American University, 1994 (Oxford University Press).
Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind: How Should A Christian Think? 2005 (Regent College Publishing).
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For more on this topic, check out this talk given at a Forum for young adults entitled Word and Censorship.
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