Minter: Counter-cultural Christianity

Published 5:00 am Thursday, December 7, 2023

In the Bible, the Apostle Peter is recorded as describing Christians as a “peculiar people” (1 Peter 2:9; King James Version), and this moniker is appropriate. Christians who believe what the Bible says and aim to live according to biblical standard and ethics are always peculiar, strange, and counter-cultural. But they don’t always appear odd in the same way.

In 1923, J. Gresham Machen published an instant classic, “Christianity and Liberalism.” In that book, Machen distinguished Christianity from an entirely different religion that was using the same label and vocabulary. Christian liberalism offered people a form of Christianity that kept most of the virtuous behavior taught in the Bible, but it also allowed adherents to jettison most Christian doctrine.

Some people argued that Christians need not believe in Noah’s flood, in Jesus’s virgin birth, or in a gospel that centers upon the sacrifice of God’s Son upon a Roman cross. But Machen argued that such doctrines were essential to Christianity. One hundred years ago, those Christians who maintained historic Christian doctrine were peculiar in a culture that desperately wanted a new kind of Christianity.

In 1978, hundreds of evangelical theologians and pastors published what became known as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy. In this public statement leading Evangelicals explained and affirmed the reliability and authority of the Bible. The impetus was that no small number of Christian leaders were denying such things.

Many academics had set their sights on dismantling the very foundation of Christian belief – the Scriptures. Leading scholars and theologians, even among historically conservative Christian denominations, denied that every word of the Bible is divinely inspired. But many Evangelicals argued that the Bible is historically accurate, that the Bible is God’s trustworthy word, and that the Bible is our ultimate authority for what we believe and how we live.

Nearly 50 years ago, those Christians who affirmed biblical inerrancy were peculiar in a culture that still wanted a new kind of Christianity.

Today, the assault on historic, biblical, and consistent Christianity is more prominently aimed at Christian practices or behavior. The culture in the West today is demanding that Christians give up their bigoted, patriarchal, and hateful standards of morality. They don’t typically care what Christians believe in their hearts and minds, but they accuse us of being unjust and unloving when we say that marriage is a covenant relationship between a man and a woman, when we say that any sexual experience outside of marriage is sinful, when we say that males and females are distinct by design, and when we say that men of good character should lovingly lead in the home and in the church.

If Christians today are to continue believing what the Bible says and striving to live according to what the Bible commands, then they are going to be peculiar in a culture that will always want some other kind of Christiantiy.

If you are a Christian, the culture will never respect or appreciate your efforts to faithfully submit to Christ and to consistently live for Him. In every generation, Christians will have to take a public stand for those beliefs and practices that are particularly repulsive and scandalous to the watching world.

We don’t get to decide where the battle rages, but we must make up our minds to be the sort of Christians that speak the truth in love to those who do not like the truth and may not like us for saying it.

— Marc Minter, a regular faith columnist, is husband to Cassie and father to Micah and Malachi. He is also the Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church of Diana. For more information, visit fbcdiana.org or email marc@fbcdiana.org.