Evangelical Christians Are Sick

The movement is driven by a painful awareness that the hearteach of our

heartsis desperately wicked.

The scene to me was new and passing strange, wrote Presbyterian pastor Barton Stone
as he witnessed a revival in Kentucky in the spring of 1801. Many, very many fell
down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently
breathless and motionless statesometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting
symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most
fervently uttered.

Small revivals like this kindled that bonfire we call the Cane Ridge Revival, what
historian Paul Conkin said is arguably the most important religious gathering in all
of American history.

One witness described the scene as events at Cane Ridge reached their climax: Sinners
dropping down on every hand, shrieking, groaning, crying for mercy, convoluted.
Professors [believers] praying, agonizing, fainting, falling down in distress for sinners,
or in raptures of joy! Some singing, some shouting, clapping their hands, hugging and
even kissing, laughing; others talking to the distressed, to one another, or to opposers of
the work, and all this at once.

So affecting was this event, that in the decades that followed, the prayer of camp
meetings across the land was Lord, make it like Cane Ridge.

Revivals like Cane Ridge are the most dramatic illustration of the point made in the first
essayin this series. Historian Perry Miller called Puritan faith a version of Augustinian
piety, a piety that is found in the best of American evangelicalism. As Miller put it in
talking about the Puritans:
As long as it remained alive, its real being was not in doctrines but behind them; the
impetus came from an urgent sense of mans predicament, from a mood so deep that it
could never be completely articulated.
Evangelical Christians at their best suffer from a sickness of soul with a genesis in this
urgent sense of mans predicament. They instinctively feel Jeremiahs lament that the
heart is desperately wicked (Jer. 17:9). They feel the weight of failure, of weaknesses,
of inadequacy, of sins. The burden makes their whole body ache and groan. Between
them and God lies a deep chasm they cannot bridge. Across the chasm, they glimpse the
beauty of Gods holiness, and they despair. If they attempt to cross it, it will only lead
them to plunge into darkness. And even if a miracle planted them suddenly on the other
side, into the very presence of a holy God, they know it would be their death, for they
know that no sinful human being can look on the face of God and live (Ex. 33:20).

This is the classic crisis that evangelicals of each generation endure. We see its
archetypal expression in the revivals, when the evangelical soul can literally throw the
evangelical body onto the ground, in spasms of agony. In its purest form, evangelical
faith is a bodily religion. Even evangelicals who embrace a less outwardly emotional
faith like Anglicanism do so, in part, because its worship engages all of the bodily
senses, as well as engaging the body in movement (kneeling, sign of the cross). It is not
the rational religion of the Deists, nor the calm, respectable religion of much of mainline
Protestantism. It is a religion in travail, certainly at the beginning, and that travail can be
so great, it makes the body itself moan or fall to its knees in repentance.

Augustine describes the days leading up to his conversion, saying,

Finally in the agony of hesitation I made many physical gestures of the kind men make
when they want to achieve something and lack the strength, either because they lack the
actual limbs or because their limbs are fettered with chains or weak with sickness or in
some way hindered.
He then suggests that he tore his hair and banged his forehead and clasped his knees.
What was causing this torment?

Lord, you turned my attention back to myself. You took me up from behind my own
back where I had placed myself because I did not wish to observe myself , and you set
me before my face so that I should see how vile I was, how twisted and filthy, covered
in sores and ulcers. And I looked and was appalled, but there was no way of escaping
from myself. If I tried to avert my gaze from myself, his story continued relentlessly,
and you once again placed me in front of myself; you thrust me before my own eyes so
that I should discover my iniquity and hate it. I had known it, but deceived myself,
refused to admit it, and pushed it out of my mind.
Augustine expresses the sense that this turmoil is a personal encounter with God, who
forces the issue upon us, by turning attention on ourselves and our sorry state, by
convicting us of sin, as the classic evangelical phrase puts it. This agony, we finally
discern, is a gift of grace that highlights our complete helplessness, that points us to our
only Help. But in the meantime, it is travail.

Of course, this season of travail does not always make itself known in dramatic bodily
expressions. But the inner anguish is nonetheless powerful. As noted in the last essay,
the slave George Liele experienced like this, saying:

[I was] convinced that I was not in the way to heaven, but in the way to hell. This state I
labored under for the space of five or six months. I was brought to perceive that my
life hung by a slender thread, and I found no way wherein I could escape the
damnation of hell, only through the merits of my dying Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
As Liele notes, the evangelical crisis is not about this life only. Its not merely about the
failure to live a moral life, to live up to our finest ideals. Its not merely a psychological
crisis, but an eschatological one. Its about life and death, about present and future,
about ones eternal destiny. To not put too fine a point on it: It is the fear of hell and the
loss of heavenly bliss.

But Lieles testimony also points to our only hope: the merits of my dying Lord and
Savior Jesus Christ.
Evangelicals are, as the previous essay suggested, Jesusy people, and by that, they mean
something specific. To become a Christian, we accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
The order is important. We do not customarily say we believe in Jesus as Savior and
Lord. Yes, in one sense, the evangelical narrative that goes like that: We are saved by
Christ, and then we begin to obey him as Lord. To put it theologically, justification and
then sanctification. That is certainly the chronological order of our spiritual journey.

And yet, we habitually talk about Jesus not as Savior and Lord but as Lord and
Savior. The order is crucial for evangelical theology. Jesus Christ, the Lord of heaven
and earth, became our perfect substitute on the cross. Our theology is certainly not
sophisticated as we writhe in travail, but our spiritual instincts are that of the great
church father Athanasius, who recognized that

Whator rather Who was it that was needed for such grace as we required? Who,
save the Word of God Himself, Who also in the beginning had made all things out of
nothing? His part it was, and his alone, both to bring again the corruptible to
incorruption and to maintain for the Father his consistency of character with all. For he
alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was in consequence both able to recreate
all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all and to be an ambassador for all with the Father.
In short, only God can save us from our tragic predicament, and thus, Jesus, even before
he is Savior, must be Lord. In another essay, well look at the evangelical theology that
arises out of this existential journeythat is, Christs substitutionary atonement on the
cross. But here I note that evangelicals are vehemently committed to this view of the
atonement because its the one that makes the most sense of our crises, the one that most
fully explains the solution to the urgency of mans predicament. For evangelical
Christians, atonement theology is grounded in atonement experience. Christs
substitutionary deathwhich is grounded in his Lordshipmakes existential sense to
us. Its the picture of Christs work that turned the lights on in our darkness, that made
wells of living water well up in our dry and parched souls.

The anguish of crisis finally ends, and the experience is equally palpable. Again,
Augustines conversion is the archetype. As he wrestles with himself and with God in a
garden, he hears a voice to take up and read a passage from Pauls letter to the
Romans, which he had been reading.

I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: Not in
riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but
put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts (Rom.
13:1314). I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of
this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the
shadows of doubt were dispelled.
At Cane Ridge, it looked like this. After praying, agonizing, fainting, falling down in
distress for sinners there came raptures of joy! Some singing, some shouting, clapping
their hands, hugging and even kissing, laughing.
Again, evangelicals come with a variety of emotional makeups, so the outward
exuberance is not always evident. And it isnt necessarily instantaneous for many.
Conversion might come with a series of small conversions or a gradual dawning of the
reality of Christs forgiveness and the new way of life offered in him. Some evangelicals
dont recognize how much in travail they had been until they experience the release. In
any event, the journey taken as a whole is dramatic in the sense that the course of our
lives has taken a crucial turn, one that has been made not merely with our minds, but
with our very bodies and with the deepest part of our being.

This drive to experience and express faith with our bodies continues as we grow in faith.
Thus we see hands raised and faces looking heavenward as we praise God in worship,
hoping and praying each week that something akin to a conversion will happen to us
again and again. Its an evangelical sacrament of sorts. (Ill explore more on how we
worship in future essays.)

The question we have to ask, of course, is to what degree this journey continues to be
characterized by serious attention to our sinfulness, an intuitive grasp of Gods holiness,
and unrestrained joy at the death of Christ on the cross. Of course the answer is, it
depends. Many evangelical churches (Ive noticed this especially among immigrant
churches and overseas) continue to teach and preach these themes regularly. But a fair
number seemed to have abandoned themand for good reason in some cases.

Weve been rightly disgusted with revivalists who can work people up into a frenzy, to
entice them to walk the sawdust trail, to experience a cathartic moment of releaseall
with the tools of social psychology. We also dont want to return to the days when we
described ourselves as vile or worthless or worms. God forbid that we should
ever return to days characterized by such bad theology and manipulative preaching.

But as studies have revealed, too many of our congregations, in the cause of meeting
people where they are, have adopted a bland version of Christianity called moralistic
therapeutic deism, in which a vague notion of a kind God is preached to salve our
psychological wounds and help us live respectable middle-class lives. Jesus is still
present, but not usually in any full-throated biblical sense. And as other studies have
shown, some sectors of the evangelical church (especially globally) are tempted by
some version of the prosperity gospel, in which God wants nothing more than to make
us successful in worldly ways. It seems fair to say that to the degree that one abandons
the classic wrestling with an urgent sense of mans predicament, the less one is
evangelical in any meaningful sense.
That some parts of our movement have shifted their emphasis is not surprising, as
evangelical faith is constantly shifting and changing, sometimes for the worse,
sometimes for the better. But its at its best when it takes our moral and mortal lives
with full seriousnesseven if that makes people uncomfortableand yet points them to
our only comfort in life and death.