MR: Today the prevailing view is that church is boring and irrelevant. Would you be so kind as to address this?
Dr. Boice: Yes, that is the prevailing view and I think it has a lot of justification. I am in a lot of churches that I find boring and irrelevant. How do you get a church to not be boring and irrelevant? Do you just hire a band to make church fun? In such a case, church might cease to be boring, but it would not become relevant. And in order to make your church relevant, do you give messages on topical issues like psychology and politics? That might meet people's needs, but is it relevant to the church?
So the question really requires thinking through what we are trying to do and the place to begin is to discover what is the purpose of church? Well, church is the gathering of the people of God. Then what do we do? What are we there for? Well, we are there for fellowship, to enjoy one another's company. But chiefly we are there to meet with God. We come together to learn from God and worship God. What worship means is to ascribe to God His attributes; to recognize and praise Him. But in order to do that you have to be taught. The Reformers understood that very well and they transformed services from celebration in the Middle Ages into teaching fellowships where the word of God was taught and where the people responded to God on the basis of the teaching.
I recognize as a preacher that there are unique problems faced in preaching to a world that is geared to entertainment and used to television with its fast moving images and attractive personalities. Preachers have a hard job. Today, I do not know how you could do as the Puritans did, for example, and preach three hour sermons. Our culture has created limitations in the church. In a given church there might be several limitations. You could be called to a church where the people have never heard a sermon longer than ten minutes. Even a half hour sermon may be difficult for the congregation to endure. But that is why you have to keep in mind what you are trying to do. You can make progress, but you have to work in the right direction. I think we have great grounds for improvement in our worship by moving in the direction of better biblical teaching and sounder theology. I recognize that takes time.
MR: In general the television has had a profound effect on society; specifically, how much has it had on education and literacy ?
Dr. Boice: I would recommend reading Neil Postman's book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, because he is an educator. Postman has a section at the in his book where he talks about education on television from his own experiences.
We are all aware, at least if you have anything to do with education that television has shortened the attention span of people, especially the young. Any grade school teacher knows that it is very hard to sustain the attention span of the child she is teaching. The attention span is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is the inability to think and that I suppose more than anything is what Postman recognizes.
I will give you a little illustration. About two years ago Harper's magazine ran a story that was a conversation between Neil Postman, who is a critic of television and a woman who thinks television is wonderful. She teaches in Philadelphia in one of the schools for the Performing Arts. The interview was taken in a very interesting format. They took them to a restaurant, bought their dinner and taped their conversation. So this article evolved from their conversation over dinner. In the middle of their dinner there was this little exchange. Postman said, "The problem was that just this last week I was working with an essay that one of my students had written. He had written two entirely contradictory things on adjoining pages. I pointed it out to him and his response was 'What is the problem?'" Postman's response was, "This habit comes from watching television, in which first you were told that there was a riot in New York City, and then there was a rape in Los Angeles, and then the Mets beat the Cardinals. Things are disjointed." To which she replied, "Well Neil that's life." To which Postman replied, "That's insanity."
There are two competing points of view. If you think disjointed is the way to go, well then you will be on the side of the entertainment age, but you will not be thinking, and Postman, who is an educator, says you have broken the laws of logic and sequence and everything. If we raise up a generation that cannot think, then we have raised up a generation that can be manipulated by people who can think and do not even know it. Television is a great manipulator. We are aware of it in the market place. It manipulates you to buy things you have no need of whatsoever. It is crazy. We are spending our money on things we think we need. Television will do this in politics too. We could easily be sold a dictator. For all our democratic traditions we could easily be sold something that would just take away our freedom because people will be unable to evaluate them. The exact same thing has happened to theology in the church. We have been sold a horrible bag of garbage, passing as theology, because we can not critique it. I have been in meetings where I have heard somebody say something that is absolute heresy, but they say it in such a whimsical way that evangelical people go out and say that was wonderful and helpful. They really cannot think and that is where the danger lies.
MR: Do you think there is any parallel between the Middle Ages and the church today, in terms of being image based, rather than word based? How do you think it effects our worship styles?
Dr. Boice: You might argue that there were excuses for it in the Middle Ages. Before the invention of the printing press, most people did not have books so if they were to know anything about the Bible it had to be through pageantry. That is why you have the miracle plays and all kinds of superstitions. At its best, the church was trying to teach. But at its worst, what happens is that you get performance in the Mass. It becomes a celebration, a mystery, and it is performed in Latin which is very impressive. It is a beautiful experience, but the people knew very little.
In the providence of God, when the Reformers came along, the printing press had already been invented. The Reformers were very well educated and even memorized literature in Latin. Calvin is a marvelous example here. In debates with Roman Catholic theologians, he could quote sections of the early fathers that they weren't familiar with at all. Calvin was so conversant with the material that he could tell you exactly where to find it on the page. So remember that the Reformation was the work of God. Remember also the tools that transformed the church: the translation of the scriptures, the scholarship and the distribution of the Bible through the printing press, and Luther's theological tracts. People were reading and understanding what they read as the Reformation was beginning to sweep over Europe.
I suppose the most direct response to the question is that in our age we are slipping back into the Middle Ages. Carl Henry wrote an address some years ago about the new barbarianism. He wrote that the barbarians were coming again. That is what is happening. We are slipping back into that kind of an age. Maybe the truth will be preserved in an equivalent to the monasteries where people can retreat. Maybe the monasteries of the next century will be a place where a group of people can meet to discuss the Bible because they are not satisfied with that superficial diet of the church.
MR: Are Presbyterian and Reformed churches experiencing some tension in worship and changing forums? To attract the boom generation many of the elements of worship have been compromised and are being modernized to appeal to, for example, people who are only comfortable with short popular songs. Where do evangelism and entertainment connect?
Dr. Boice: I think that is a very good question, because it is a pragmatic one. It is the kind of question you have to wrestle with. If, for example, you are working with people who are starving in Ethiopia, you have to feed them and present the Gospel as you do. But your danger, you see, is to substitute social work with the Gospel by thinking that when you have fed them you have done the job. You are really there not simply to save the body, but to save the soul. Now the same sort of principles operate in worship. We do have a superficial entertainment-oriented culture with its own kind of music. The problem is that you could succeed so well at entertaining that you could forget what you are really trying to do. That is something that really has to be understood.
I talk to the young people in my church a lot. We have fairly traditional services back east, although there is a lot of experimental stuff there, too. The young people like the contemporary music. But understand what you are doing, you are having fun. Do not say it is worship just because you leave the building feeling good. Your feeling good does not make it worship. Now you can worship and feel good. You can also worship and be distraught because you have been in the presence of God and you are a sinner and you need to change your life. Above all, what I tell them is to get away from these repetitious mantras. Recognize what those things are. They put you in a certain emotional frame of mind to open your mind. And you need to think about what it is that these mantras are opening your minds up to. Maybe that creates the kind of mood in which people are open to the preaching of the Word. But would it perhaps be better to sing something which reflects what it is you are going to talk about so they can begin to think and do, not just have a blank mind.
We have made some changes in our worship service. For example in the call to worship at the beginning of the service, I open with the text that I am going to preach on, or a corresponding text. I introduce it that way, at the very beginning of the service, because I want them to start thinking.
MR: How is the church making accommodations to the culture in theology?
Dr. Boice: At the worst, the church has eliminated anything that is offensive. For example, talking about sin. They think people do not want to hear about sin so they simply stop mentioning it. There is a great pressure to eliminate anything that appears to be abstract, and that refers to most theology, doesn't it. What did Jesus do on the cross? He died for our sins. What does it mean to say that he died for our sins? That is the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement. What was accomplished by the substitutionary atonement? Christ turned aside the wrath of God. That is propitiation. And by this propitiation Christ reconciled men and women to God. To talk about the atonement, propitiation, or reconciliation, is to talk about very abstract concepts. It is something that was actually done by Jesus Christ. But when you try to explain what it is that he did, you have theological terminology. Well, there is an enormous pressure to do away with theology. You do not have to understand. You do not have to know what Jesus accomplished. Now if you do that, what are you left with? What kind of faith do you have? We all believe in faith. You have faith in Jesus. But who is the Jesus you believe in? Just the man Jesus? No, he is the divine Jesus as well. But now you are talking about theology again. There is just no way of avoiding that if you are going to have a religion that means anything. Unfortunately, the tendency today is to say that people cannot follow it, so we will have a religion that does not mean anything. But if we are not talking about anything more significant than how to feel good or how to raise your children, then Christianity will have become just another self-help fad and it will pass away as all fads do.
MR: In your view, what role does the Christian Right have in framing a Christian mind?
Dr. Boice: Christians are not only citizens of the kingdom of God, they are citizens of the earthly state. We have a responsibility to the state and that includes, in a democracy, the right to vote. Christians certainly should exercise their rights as citizens. But what we have to bear in mind, and I think this is where some elements of the Christian Right have missed out, is that even at the best if we achieve what we think we want to achieve we still have a simple human state. We do not bring in the kingdom of God by voting for Christian politicians. Even if they are men or women of absolute integrity, it is still a sinful world. Power corrupts. It corrupts in US politics and is an enormous problem. Of course, we should pray for them. We should elect them if they are competent. So all of that we ought to do, but we have to bear in mind that salvation does not come through politics.
What is our role? As citizens, we vote and we should be responsible. But our role as Christians is to think and act as Christians, and that is always going to set us apart from the state. Christians are always going to have a part in the governmental process because the role of the church is to remind the state that it is responsible to God, and will be judged by God. When we have a political agenda it is very easy to forget that responsibility and become just another political interest group. When Jesus said, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's," he set up a polarity in terms of the church and the state. There are some people who believe that the state has no legitimate authority. The only authority is God working through the church. They turn their backs on any kind of involvement in society. Then there are those who believe the state is the only legitimate institution, and the church is illegitimate. Folks such as these believe the only real authority is secularism. Then, there is the position that both the church and the state are under God, but the state is dominant. Now that is the position of cowards, because if you have God in the picture at all, the state should not be dominant over what God is doing. The best position with church and state is with God over both. The church and the state are both responsible to God, and the role of the church is to remind the state of its responsibility as well as reminding itself of that. We are not there to do politics, but we are there to obey God.
MR: What is the role of the Bible and the Holy Spirit in renewing our minds?
Dr. Boice: The Reformers had that wonderful combination which we need to be reminded of again and again. They said you need Word and Spirit together, because whenever you separate the two you get in trouble. If you have the Word without the Spirit, the Bible becomes a dead letter. You can study that in a university from an unbelieving professor and you can spell out the theology with accuracy, but that is not religion, that is just academics. On the other hand you have people who put a great deal of emphasis on the Spirit. The Spirit told me this, or the Spirit told me that. They detach it from the Bible, creating excess and subjectivity. If you claim God told you to do something, I am unable to critique that apart from the Bible and you are unable to critique it yourself. Therefore, the Reformers stressed that you have to have the Word and Spirit together. So that is why when we study the Bible; first of all we study the Bible, and secondly, as we study the Bible, we pray asking for illumination. The same Holy Spirit who inspired the Bible also illuminates our minds to understanding the Word.
MR: How do we as Reformation Christians build a bridge to reach those people who are under the sway of entertainment religion?
Dr. Boice: I think that is a great problem we have when we get into this kind of thinking persons religion. We tend to become elitist. It is not intentional. However, what do you do about the masses out there who really are illiterate? In Philadelphia, 60% of the high school graduates are functionally illiterate. There are students who have completed grade school and they cannot write two consecutive sentences. If people do not think and are only being entertained, what do we do? I do not have any simple answers. I do know that in the Reformation we can find some answers. In the Middle Ages, for example, most people could not read or write; books were not available. But when the Reformers came along, they helped to educate the masses and to increase the literacy among the people of God. Another thing that is not said much about the Reformation, which I think is very important, was the growth of small groups throughout Europe. I think there is a great advantage to small groups. One of the advantages is that you conduct them on whatever the level of the people in the group, with a leader who can work with them one on one. Enormous progress can be made there.
MR: Is it not perhaps too late to reverse the trend caused by television and the lack of a print society?
Dr. Boice: I hope not. I am not a prophet, but how can it ever be too late for Christians? Would we have said that about the Soviet Union, after the revolution, it is too late? "They had their chance. They sold out to communism and, look, it is destroying them." Who would ever have imagined that in 1989 they would have that change?
The power of the Holy Spirit is unchanged. If the Christian church in America, which is numerous, would actually turn from its wicked ways, confess its sin, pray, and actually seek the face of God, then maybe we will begin to see reformation. And we can contribute to that. If we would do that-and really do it-who could tell what God might do. God never automatically just rights something off. Take Israel for example, with all of her sin, generation after generation. And yet time after time, reprieve after reprieve, God withheld his judgment from her. Maybe God will give us a reprieve. Certainly, that is something for which we should pray.
