Five weeks from now, on June 15th, a few of the remaining sons of Issachar in America will mark the tenth anniversary of the death of evangelicalism following a long illness. On that day in 2015, its death was pronounced by the United States Supreme Court’s Final Judgment in the now largely forgotten decision, Obergefell v. Hodges. Since then, an autopsy on the Court’s decision has been performed by Issachar’s descendants, and a number of them will celebrate evangelicalism’s passing. The following is an eye-witness report.
On that Monday, the Court declared that “same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry. No longer may this liberty be denied to them.”
This would have been a shocking understanding of both the marital relationship and liberty to those who ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. But, now, logically speaking, genderless and sexless is the overarching defining nature of everyone’s state-licensed marital relationship.
Issacharians who studied the Final Judgment and the opinion supporting it have determined the cause of death. It happened because our nation’s leading lights no longer believe that anything in nature reveals and points to any metaphysical (spiritual) reality that goes beyond the physical characteristics of human beings. Consequently, this is now the nature and purpose of marriage according to the Court:
Marriage responds to the universal fear that a lonely person might call out only to find no one there. It offers the hope of companionship and understanding and assurance that while both still live there will be someone to care for the other.
How mere physics gives rise to unseen metaphysical realities like “fear” and a desire for “companionship” and “understanding,” and why those can’t be solved having an owner-friendly pit bull, is not something the Issacharians have figured out. The Court’s metaphysical nihilism seems to make realities of these “unseen things.”
Nevertheless, Obergefell appears to explain the futuristic vision of David Hogg, vice-chair of the Democratic Party who said “pets are the new kids.” That’s in accord with the idea of the new “chosen family” concept that developed within two years of Obergefell.
This reporter remembers the Sunday following Monday’s Final Judgment. Many evangelical pulpits spoke negatively, some even forcefully, about the Court’s Final Judgment. Nationwide, Christian legislators and Christian legal and policy organizations decried it.
In response, three national legal/policy advocacy organizations with a Christian flavoring convened a meeting in Washington, D.C. that October. Having attended, I can report that not one presenter said a word over two days about needing to develop a legislative or litigation strategy to challenge the Court’s Final Judgment and its legal reasoning. None seem to have offered one since.
This reporter could also find no evidence that any evangelical denomination called its leading lights together to think about how to reverse what some in their pulpits called an abomination. However, fears about church facilities being compelled to provide a venue for homosexual “marriages” was a big deal. In response to that felt need, many policy organizations issued reports and guidance to protect church buildings.
In retrospect, what happened on the Sunday following the Final Judgment, and in the weeks that followed, appears to have been only the thrashings of evangelicalism’s dead “body.” It was the last ebbing of life remaining from its centuries’ long accommodation to culture’s Darwinian-induced embrace of nihilism.
As a keen observer of events since the Court’s Final Judgment, I would offer the following analysis.
As with all the church’s historical accommodations and capitulations to the Lord Jesus Christ as the foundation for literally everything , physically and metaphysically (1 Corinthians 3:11, Colossians 1:15-18), it seems to have taken some time for Issachar’s descendants to awaken from what might be called an evangelical-induced slumber. But, increasingly, they are coming to grips with the manifold culture-destroying implications of the Court’s Final Judgment and opinion. Those implications and the reason some of them are memorializing June 15th on their calendars are covered below.
On the other hand, it appears that little to no thought has been given to the Final Judgment and the Court’s opinion by others within the orbit of modern evangelicalism. They seem to have de-incarnated the risen and ascended Jesus Christ of history. The following is this reporter’s description how different strains of evangelicalism seem to have accomplished this feat.
A number of evangelical Calvinists reduced saving faith to human reasoning and tried to “prove” to nihilists the reasonableness of what can’t be seen. Reason alone can’t prove the unseen to a nihilist.
Most evangelical dispensationalists turned the “hope” of the Gospel into a raptured escape from history, making it unnecessary to bother with the culture-destroying consequences of the Final Judgment.
More than a few evangelical charismatics condensed the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to heartfelt subjective emotions stirred by loud music or being able to speak words that no one can interpret and apply.
And a strange, winner-take-all battle began to brew among two competing types of evangelicals, legalists and antinomians. Some theonomists turned Jesus Christ as the telos of the Law into old covenant thunder and lightening to be heartlessly employed in legislation to browbeat Bunyan’s Pilgrim into submission. In a reaction to this, “gospel-centered” evangelicals offered grace but without truth if it was hard on the ears.
Ironically, some of the awakened Sons of Issachar are now “celebrating” the Court’s Final Judgment.
They say that when God’s “judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness” (Isaiah 26:9 KJV). Therefore, they report not being downcast by what they consider the judgment of God: America’s Highest Court fully embracing nihilism and every state paying obeisance to it. Rather, they see His judgment as a opportunity for the glorious reappearing of the Lord Jesus Christ as the ground and focus of the gospel’s proclamation.
As support for the view, they referred this reporter to the following description of the Gospel truth by influential seventeenth century Puritan theologian, John Owen (Christologia, p. 65, emphasis supplied and modernized):
“In him is life, and the life is the light of men:” John 1:4. He is “the true Light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world:” ver. 9. [T]ruth . . . cannot communicate any light to the mind except as it is a beam from him, because the mind is God’s organ to convey light from that fountain. . . .
Separated from him and its relation unto him, [the mind] will not retain that truth, and it cannot communicate to the souls of men any real spiritual light from or understanding of that truth. How could it, if all light be originally in him — as the Scripture testifies? . . .
Whatever head knowledge men may have of the divine truths doctrinally proposed in the Scripture, if they do not know them in their respect unto the person of Christ as the foundation of the counsels of God — if they don’t discern how they proceed from him and centre in him — those truths will bring no spiritual, saving light to their understanding. For all spiritual life and light is in him, and from him alone.
Wherefore, even as professors of the truth separated from Christ as unto real union with him are withering branches, so also are professed truths if doctrinally separated from him, or given respect unto him: They have no living power or efficacy in the souls of men.
When Christ is formed in the heart by those truths, when he dwells plentifully in the soul through their operation, then only will those doctrinal truths put forth their proper power and efficacy. Otherwise, they are as waters separated from the fountain -- they quickly dry up or become a noisome puddle, or, as a beam interrupted from its continuity unto the sun, they are immediately deprived of light.
“This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all. (1 John 1:5 KJV, emphasis added).
My review of the situation brought me to the following conclusion:
When pulpits are again aflame with a declaration of Christ—who He is as God in essence, as a distinct Person in the Godhead, and as sole holder of the office of mediator between God and His new creation in Christ; when the manifold implications of Him as foundational to a right and fruitful understanding of all things are declared; and when the power of that understanding begins to inform Gospel faith, the calling out of the Light needed to “divide the light from the darkness” of our nihilistic culture will again be heard. And many who hear will, by the gift of saving faith, see “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” (Genesis 1:4 and 2 Corinthians 4:6, respectively).
Mark your calendars for June 15th and pray to God for His light to shine again within evangelicalism. God still raises the dead to life!
