MR is published by the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. MR's editor-in-chief, Michael Horton, recently sat down in Atlanta with a few members of the Council that directs the Alliance, and asked them to explain what the Alliance is and why it exists. Joining him for the conversation were council members R. C. Sproul, chairman of Ligonier Ministries; John Hannah, professor of historical theology at Dallas Theological Seminary; Ken Jones, pastor of Greater Union Baptist Church in Compton, California; and Mark Talbot, professor of philosophy at Wheaton College. -EDS.
Horton: Besides being an extended family that exists to keep R. C. in line, what is the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals?
Sproul: That's a great question, Mike. Do you have any others?
Horton: This is going to be a long interview-
Hannah: The Alliance is a gathering of concerned churchmen and churchwomen from a wide spectrum of the evangelical world, who are concerned collectively about the direction-or misdirection-of the evangelical community in our country. We are an alliance; we are not a church. We are evangelicals in the Reformation sense of that term. We are confessional in that we embrace collectively the great creeds of the faith, particularly those of the Reformation. And we believe that a return to the great doctrines of the Gospel as expressed by the reformers would bring a significant awakening and return to a bibliocentricty within our country. What binds us together then is a commitment to the five great solas of reformational Christianity.
Horton: What are those five solas-or "only's" of the Reformation?
Sproul: The first is sola Scriptura: By the Scripture alone. Only the Scripture has the authority to bind our consciences absolutely because only God has the authority to impose obligations upon us absolutely. And since the Scriptures are his Word, they carry this singular authority.
Hannah: Then you have sola gratia: the fundamental notion that we as human, fallen creatures can offer and contribute to God absolutely nothing but our degradation. When it comes to redemption in Christ Jesus, that salvation is a work of God, based upon the discriminatory, uncaused nature of his grace.
Jones: Sola fide follows that. And that is the idea that man is justified before God not on the basis of his own works. Rather, he appropriates God's grace by faith, and so faith itself is not a power but it is the instrument by which we embrace the free, unmerited grace of God.
Talbot: We have solus Christus, which says that everything that we receive from God in the way of grace comes through the work of Christ, both the work that he did for us on the cross in atoning for our sins, and his righteousness as it is imputed to us. Our sins were imputed to him, so that he could atone for them, and his righteousness is imputed to us.
Horton: If we listen to all of that, we can only conclude, "Of Him, to Him and through Him are all things"-which is what the last sola does. Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be glory. And that really does put a capstone on everything that all of you have mentioned. God does all the work; he gets all the glory.
When it comes to the question that you raised, John, about the state of the evangelical community, what particularly are you talking about? Are we as an alliance saying that evangelicals don't believe in Scripture, Grace, Christ, Faith? Or are we saying that they aren't viewed as sufficient by evangelicals?
Hannah: They are clearly not viewed as central. The central proclamation of the Church is Christ crucified. But when I go about my country and listen to what I hear, my deduction is that we are so caught up with the immediate challenge of helping people and caring for them in a generic sense, that we have cut the root which makes all that possible.
Sproul: Mike, we saw a crisis emerge in the second half of the twentieth century in the so-called evangelical community. We saw the advent of what was called neo-Evangelicalism after World War II. This new Evangelicalism which I believe was guided by honest, earnest, godly people who wanted to make a difference in the culture, who wanted to become active participants in the academic arena, and to be more mainstream than separatistic. But out of this movement we've seen, sadly, an erosion of commitment to the central content of historical Evangelicalism, as well as a new kind of syncretism. And the established leadership of American Evangelicalism has so changed its complexion that I hardly recognize it anymore as being evangelical. That's why we have to qualify that word in our self-definition, by saying that we are "confessing" or "confessional" evangelicals. What we're saying is that we are trying to maintain historic Evangelicalism over against these significant shifts in the so-called evangelical establishment.
Horton: Jim Boice, who took the lead in pulling us all together, used to emphasize that there was at least a minimal level of creedal agreement that all "evangelicals" had to sign on to. Those of us from confessional churches had creeds and confessions, but evangelical organizations would adopt some minimalist statement so that there were at least some boundaries. Jim would say that this worked in the first couple of decades after World War II, but gradually that agreement was eroded-
Sproul: Yes, but the real glue that brought some unity across that wide evangelical spectrum was the two solas: sola Scriptura and sola fide. No matter where else we might have disagreed doctrinally, we all agreed that the Bible was our authority, that it was the inspired, inerrant Word of God-and we all agreed on justification by faith alone. That was the basis of cohesion. What's happened since is that we've seen the loss of that unity on the authority of the Bible, and thus in the last fifteen years or so, we've seen the crumbling and disintegration of our firm commitment to the Reformation doctrine of sola fide.
Jones: This relates to what John mentioned earlier when he referred to preaching Christ. That is more than just mentioning the name of Christ; it's more than just saying you "love Jesus." Professor Hannah said specifically "Christ and him crucified!" We hear a great deal about Christ, and there is one sense in which the person of Jesus has never been more famous or well-known than he is today. But what we are hearing is "Jesus as role model." It used to be just Jesus as a good teacher, but he's no longer just a good teacher; now he is a moral example. We have the WWJD, we have Jesus as a young adult single, we have Jesus as a young revolutionary, Jesus as a radical-Jesus is everything but Savior. And, one of the things that I think the evangelical community needs to confess is the person and work of Jesus Christ. He is the God-man; he hasn't come solely as our "good example," but he came to live and obey the Law of God for us. He didn't live first to point the way for us; he lived for us. His righteousness, his thirty-three years of obedience is for us; it is credited to us just as is his death. We need to really recapture the person and work of Christ, we need to confess that as a Church, because everyone who calls the name of Christ doesn't necessarily know him as Lord and Savior.
Horton: But is that practical, Mark? All this talk about doctrine. We have these people walking in off the street and they want to know how their lives can be better. And don't we miss a great opportunity if we're stuck on these things that really take a long time for people to understand anyway?
Talbot: We have to remember that the Gospel is believed only by God's supernatural work within the heart of those who hear his Word as the Holy Spirit runs along the pathway of that Word. God regenerates hearts. I'd say that is practical. It's practical in the sense that the Gospel cannot be believed by human effort alone: There's no amount of dressing it up that can bring people to God and Christ. It is always a work of God and what we are to do is to proclaim faithfully God's Word, to make these confessions fearlessly and clearly day in and day out while praying that God himself, by his Spirit will so touch the hearts of our hearers that they will accept it. And if we try anything less, if we say, "Well, we're going to lure them in by means of telling them how they can have better marriages or how their families can be better,"-no matter how much that brings people in, it does not bring them to the Gospel. Bringing them to the Gospel is a matter of our just faithfully proclaiming the Word and then God being the one who gives the increase and the fruit through his Spirit.
Horton: I have a friend who started to attend this Bible study where they began by saying, "Now, whatever we do in this Bible study, just realize that we're not going to talk about doctrine. This is just inductive Bible study." Can you imagine reading the Bible for more than five minutes-
Sproul: If you're going to read the Bible without paying attention to doctrine, it's over after you read the name of the company that published it!
Talbot: There's another reason why we've lost confidence in the Word of God, that is, that we have forgotten that words are necessary for distinctively human living. Human beings are spiritual beings even before they're Christians, because their psychology cannot be nailed down simply to their physiology. Human beings cannot make sense of life without hearing words. Stories, histories, commands, announcements-these give the space within which we live, and so words are necessary for everyone. Long before we get to the Christian faith, words are necessary for people to live distinctively human lives. Then part of the great news of Christianity is that God has given us his very words. We are "verb-ivores"-word eaters. Essentially, by our nature, Psalm 32:8-9 says, that's just the difference between human beings and everything else in creation. By means of those words we become human; by means of God's words we become what we are supposed to be.
Hannah: I'm writing a history of Evangelicalism in the twentieth century now, and my thesis is that where liberalism was 100 years ago, Evangelicalism is today. They took Christ out of the Gospel and reduced it to a moralism without root and proclaimed it to the death of their churches.
Horton: H. Richard Niebuhr characterized liberalism as "a God without wrath, brought men without sin, into a kingdom without judgment, through a Christ without a cross." That could also describe what you hear in a lot of evangelical churches today.
Hannah: It's just striking to me that we battled the Enlightenment for nearly three hundred years. Now the Enlightenment has dissolved by its own inconsistencies into the nothingness of post-modernism. But at the very time that our greatest adversary-rationalism-is defeated, we decide to adopt it to our own death, if we're not careful.
Sproul: And you have to say too that the relativism of the secular culture has so infiltrated the evangelical world that Evangelicalism in America today is more relativistic than the nineteenth-century liberals ever were. Those liberals would blush at-
Horton: Exactly. If you compare the moral teachings of your classic liberals like a William Newton Clark, or a Walter Rauschenbusch, it was fairly altruistic and giving. But we live in a culture that defines the Gospel as self-improvement, self-fulfillment, self-betterment-which is narcissistic to the core.
Jones: One of the challenges that I think we face as an alliance as we call attention to all of these problems is how to tell people they are sick while they think they are at the prime of their health. We have never seen more mega-churches than we've seen developed over the last twenty years. Christian merchandising is off the charts. We see athletes celebrating touchdowns by giving prayers in the end zone. We hear famous personalities giving testimonies. We have Christian broadcasting. We have all of these things, so in many respects people are thinking that the church has never been healthier. And so an organization like the Alliance has the unenviable task of telling people that in actuality we are very sick. That's one of the difficulties of the Alliance-telling people that we can't be fooled by the countless mega-churches. We can't be fooled by the fact that we see supposedly Christian programming (really just spiritual programming) on commercial television and other things that we wouldn't have seen twenty, thirty years ago. But at the same time, as John has indicated, we've lost the heart of the Gospel. Christ has been reduced to everything but Savior; the authority of Scripture is undermined. People may be going to church, but what are they hearing preached?
Hannah: One writer has said there have never been so many of us at any time in human history to have had so little influence on this culture. The essence of our faith is Christ, but one of the fruits of a vivacious Christianity is that we make contact with our culture.
Horton: That's one of the amazing things about the Reformation. Here were people who did not set out to change the culture at all. I mean, not even a little bit did they set out to change the culture. They wanted to turn the light back on in the Church and to recover the Gospel. But in doing that, the Reformation spawned what historians identify as a major impetus for the advance of civilization in science, the arts, benevolent concerns, and a whole host of other areas. And here evangelicals are today with this proud boast that there are 60 million of us-which really shouldn't be all that proudly announced because the salt has lost its savor. There's constant bellyaching about the state of the culture and yet the statistics (on divorce, etc.) show that evangelical Christians don't live any differently. And then when you start digging a little bit, we find they don't think differently from non-Christians either.
Hannah: I think one evidence of the greatness of the Reformation is that it has taken five hundred years to erode it. It impacted our culture. Evangelicalism is at a point of crisis, but for the those of us associated with the Alliance, our passion isn't really about what is wrong. Our passion is really about the beauty of a Savior who is all right. And we're committed with reckless abandon to give our lives away joyfully to him, and we fundamentally believe that a proclamation of the simplicity of all that he has done is really all that is needed.
Horton: Exactly-and since this organization isn't the Church, we can't fix what's lacking. Only churches faithfully preaching the Word and administering the Sacraments can make a dent. We just provide resources (from MR to broadcasts to conferences) that help pastors and laypeople think through these issues so that real reformation can happen in their churches.
Jones: Much of the problem is a result of pastors having lost confidence, and so if there's going to be any solution it will come as pastors regain that confidence in the Word. One of the best things we have done or can do is to strengthen and encourage those pastors to stand and regain that confidence in the sufficiency of Scripture and in the power of God through the Gospel.
Sproul: Exactly, Ken. Why else would somebody trade the bold and accurate proclamation of the Gospel for a technique to build the church unless you have lost confidence in the Gospel's being the power of God unto salvation?
Talbot: And that is happening in all of our denominations.
Horton: That's right. This isn't just about some evangelicals "out there." This is under our nose in our own churches, and in our own hearts.
Hannah: And I think this lack of confidence is in our own seminaries. I'm a teacher in one, and what really pains me is watching the young men come through and walking away with a bag of technologies without a heart for Christ. And so the endemic problems that we're seeing are being spilled into our churches every day there is a graduation. This is obviously my bias because of my life, but we need to earnestly pray that God will raise up professors who will direct these men to the sufficiency of Christ.
Sproul: Listen to that! Listen to that passion. Here is a professor of historical theology, making it clear that what we are about is Christ. Contrary to popular opinion, formal theology isn't about pontificating regarding some abstract doctrines of the faith. Rather, it is about love and affection for Christ. It is about seeing the Church filled with pastors who know the Word of God and who love the Word of God-and love it enough to want to propagate it to their people. It isn't technologies and techniques-it is the Gospel that will win people.
