Why is Denver Christianity so thin?

The old doctrines seem to be the most important and contested doctrines. This should not surprise us, as modernity itself has proven an attempt to redefine the foundations rather than debate the particulars.

So, let's consider Creation and Incarnation, but I think Atonement should be in there too.

Creation:

Has God made the world a particular way - all the way down? Is the world simply a neutral palette on which God imposes an arbitrary law as a sort of test to mankind? Is God's Law - all of his commands, a description of a righty ordered life and society specifically mapped to the creation He made - or, again, is it simply divine command given to creatures living in a world that could work any number of different ways? Put one more way - Do God's laws actually reveal something about creation? In one specific arena: are men made something *as men*, such that they are fit and unfit for particular offices and roles? Are women made something *as women* such that they are fit and unfit for particular offices and roles? In other words, is God's command that the office and vocation of minister being given only to men something arbitrary or does it reveal something about the nature of man and woman? Is it some supernatural command superimposed on the neutral creation - or is it a part of the created order itself?

The assault in our day (say, the last 200 years or so) has been at this very point. It is not for nothing that the compromise in our day began with debates about the meaning of Genesis 1-2. For most evangelicals - and I mean even the complementarian ones, God's commands are simply supernatural commands superimposed on a neutral creation. There is no created *order*, at least not functionally. The secular and the sacred are divorced almost entirely. A state is a state. A family is a family. A school is a school. A man is just a man and a woman is just a woman. The phrase often used in the Christian Nationalism debate is that "only individuals can be Christians" - but even that isn't quite right for this erroneous view. More accurately to say, "only souls (stripped of their nationhood, family, maleness and femaleness) can be Christians." Men nations and households are just secular things that Christians’ souls might or might not inhabit. For most evangelical Christians, not really knowing what to do with God's law otherwise, it is simply a thing that we should try to generally keep (but not too carefully) because, well, God commanded those things - but they are largely unrelated to how the world or men or women or families or nations or schools *actually* work. This isn't new, by the way. It is simply repackaged gnosticism, the earliest heresy in the Dragon's long (and doomed to fail) assault on the church.

But the historic and biblical teaching is far richer and more glorious. There is a reason we read the old theologians selectively. We love Augustine, Calvin, and the Puritans when we think they are talking about the redemption of our *souls*. But we find them intolerable and severe when they start talking about Christian nations, Christian magistrates, Christian families, and even Christian households. There is a reason why Denver Christians bristle at the imposition of God's explicit commands spoken from pulpits or a minister and call it "legalism" or "harsh." Part of it is simply the nature of sin - but sin that takes on the pseudo-intellectual skin of a gnosticism that claims God has no real claims on our actual bodies and our actual institutions.

God made the world with a grain. God's law graciously teaches us how to live life as men and women worship in our churches, build nations, structure households, raise children, and do fruitful work with that grain, not in a way that splinters the wood and ruins the work. When we maintain that the world can work just as well most any old way, and God's law and wisdom are simply something for our our individual souls, we wreck everything, eventually. Churches that find creative ways (or some less-creative ways) to disregard God's specific commands regarding men and women's offices and vocations undermine the very nature of what it means (in accordance with creation itself) to be man and woman - and therefore undermine everything those things are connected to: the household (marriage, children, and generational life), and society itself. Years ago, as the Gospel Coalition was founded, John Piper got roasted for insisting that men and women's roles in the church and home be put into the defining documents. His response was puzzling to me at the time, but it is loaded with wisdom as I look back now. He defended the move by arguing that it was an upstream issue and a kind of litmus test for how one reads the bible. Now many complementarians have found a creative way to have their cake and eat it too, saying things like: "Men and women aren't really different, but God has given us this random command in 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians - don't know why he did that, but He did." Soon, we do this with any of God's commands that contradict the moral codes of our day, and we have thus attempted to sever heaven and earth.

Incarnation:

This is sort of the twin of the Creation question - simply adding the element of redemption. Did God come to save and restore the created order, or did he come to save us from it? Its the same question that often divides the novel eschatology of dispensationalism from the more historic eschatologies of the church: Who is moving in Revelation 21-22? Heaven moves to earth. Glory *fills* the earth. Jesus doesn't put on a human skin suit to show us how to pass the test. He redeems humanity - he redeems Creation by becoming a man, dying and rising, and then ascending with our humanity - our created humanity - to the right hand of the Father - the office we were created to occupy. In other words, the Incarnation is not merely about a rescue operation for humanity to escape our created-ness and our maleness and our femaleness - but a restoration of all those things and with it, the whole of creation, work, families, and nations. Jesus comes to save us from our sins is true in the most profound way imaginable. He saves us from the wrath and judgment our sins deserve in light of God's law. He saves us from slavery to those sins. He saves us from the death those sins inevitably lead to. He saves us from a world marred by generations of humans cutting against the grain. He saves the whole world from corruption and death. The incarnation pulls *everything* into the salvation work of God. He did not come merely to save individual souls off to some unnatural state. He came to save men and women, just as he came to save manhood and womanhood. He came to save families, just as he came to save the household as a created institution. He came to save particular nations, as he came to save nation-ness. Jesus came as the second Adam, not to destroy the created order, but to save it - to restore it. This means that a robust and maturing embodiment of that salvation must mark the church. Sins have been forgiven. We have been freed from slavery to sins. And so we are now free to "put on Christ" as Paul said - and to disciple families and nations and particular men as men and particular women as women.

We must return to these foundations and then let them reshape our worship, lives, politics, families, and churches. They are doctrines that touch everything else: every other doctrine, every other ethical issue, and, more importantly, our day-to-day lives with husbands, wives, children, and the work we do. They hit at the biggest questions in the world as well as the most mundane: From "What is the world?" and "What are we *for?*" to "What do I do when my two-year-old won't stop throwing her carrots on the floor?" Christian life and doctrine are a marvelous fabric woven from a single thread, and they shape everything. We have attempted to sever that thread for too long, cutting off bits we find embarrassing or passé. But to do so is to miss its beauty and its glory, and it is to transform Christianity into a threadbare patchwork quilt with most of its patches gone when what God has given us is a marvelously beautiful, insulated wool blanket for when the days are cold, as our nation’s days seem to be creeping towards winter.