Monday, April 28, 2025

Part I

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The Liberal Challenge: The Death of Pope Francis Raises Huge Questions With Big Lessons for Both Catholics and Protestants

We knew it would be big and it was. We knew it would gain a great deal of media attention and it did. I’m speaking about Saturday’s funeral for Pope Francis, and I’m talking about the Requiem Mass there in St. Peter’s, and as you are looking at a quarter of a million people gathering for this event, it was a very big event indeed. And of course it makes sense given the stature of the Roman Catholic Church just in terms of its worldwide influence and given the odd situation that the Pope of the Roman Catholic Church is also considered to be a reigning monarch and is treated as such by most foreign nations as well. He is treated not only as the head of a church, he’s treated as the head of a government, and thus the funeral of a pope offers that rare opportunity for the gathering of so many heads of state and others.

President Donald Trump was there along with Mrs. Trump, former president Joe Biden was there along with Mrs. Biden, and as you looked to the crowd and especially at the dignitaries, you saw a gathering that is one of those very rare events, almost every one of them unprecedented just in terms of historical significance. And of course you have the simultaneous attention in the Roman Catholic Church and observing the Roman Catholic Church, the simultaneous attention to the legacy of this pope, Pope Francis, and the question as to who will be his successor and what that will mean. At this point with the funeral over, even though there are nine days of mourning, it is expected that it is the second question that is going to become a rather public obsession and that will not be satisfied until the new pope is announced.

But looking back at Pope Francis, and we’ve done that in terms of his pontificate, I want us to take a look at a larger discussion that has been occasioned by his death, and this is the larger issue of conservative and liberal positions in the church, conservative and liberal trajectories in terms of theology and church teaching. In this case, what is almost universally held and what the media seemed to be so intent on communicating is that Pope Francis was a more liberal pope following two more conservative popes, and thus you have the progressivist, liberal side hoping that the legacy and papacy of Francis will be continued, and you have conservatives, described often in the press as reactionaries, you have conservatives hoping for something discontinuous, for a reset pope who will be more traditional in terms of church teachings and for that matter just uphold the teachings of the church which seems to be the least you could expect of a pope.

So there’s an interesting juxtaposition of articles in the wake of the death of Pope Francis and in the anticipation of the election, his successor. And so the Wall Street Journal had a front-page article headlined “Conservative US Catholics Gain Sway,” the subhead, “Adherence Revival Practices Grow More Assertive as the Church Enters a New Era.” Meanwhile, the New York Times had a headline story, “Progressive Christians Feeling Besieged Seek a Path Without Francis.”

Part II

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The Disintegrating Effects of Theological Liberalism: Protestant Liberalism Leads to Emptiness and Death, Just Look at Its Churches

Now just to make clear here, my main purpose in looking at this is not going to be Pope Francis. It’s going to be the question of liberalism or conservatism in theology and just in terms of worldview, even on social and moral positions, perhaps especially on social and moral positions as the most controversial issues in the public eye, and understanding that there is a pattern here that we really do need to consider carefully and observe. It is a pattern that appears in Catholicism and in Protestantism. It is a pattern that appears in Catholicism and in evangelicalism, and we had better note it very carefully. Now seems to be an opportune time.

Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham of the New York Times began their account this way, “For 12 years, Pope Francis was the most powerful Christian on the world stage, using his voice to elevate the poor and marginalized. Millions of progressive Christians in the United States, Catholic and non-Catholics alike, considered him to be a powerful counterweight to a rising conservative Christian power. He was the magnetic center for their values. His death on Monday of last week leaves behind a question gnawing inside their minds. In a world without Pope Francis, where their values feel particularly vulnerable, where do they go from here?” So the New York Times sets the stage in a very interesting way by saying that the death of Pope Francis is not only now a moment of crisis for liberal Catholics, but also for liberal people who consider themselves Christians but not Catholic, liberals in general. You might say religious liberals were very encouraged by Pope Francis. Conservatives not so much.

Now by the way, the evaluation on Pope Francis is something that will take some time. That’s the case with any major historical figure, not to mention someone holding an office as complex as the papacy, but it is really interesting to see that in the aftermath basically everyone seems to agree that the basic importance of the pontificate of Pope Francis is that he was a liberal following two conservatives. He was hope to the liberals who had been just waiting out two very long, and that means together one long period of two pontificates, first Pope John Paul II and then Pope Benedict XVI. Benedict’s tenure was much shorter, but he was seen as a continuation, if not even an accentuation of the conservatism of John Paul II. And so Pope Francis was the answer to the prayers of so many liberals, and quite frankly he was exactly what many conservatives had feared.

But the point I want to make here is that the New York Times is affirming that this is bigger than Catholicism. It’s not just progressive Catholics who loved Pope Francis. It was also more liberal Christians as they would identify themselves in the mainline Protestant denominations and even some in the left wing of evangelicalism. So here’s where I just want to look at this and ask the question, how in the world do you get to be a liberal, and how is it that you come to be identified as a conservative in theology? Well, here’s something very interesting. It is parallel to the political structure with the same labels. It’s not the same thing, but it is parallel.

And so let’s define the terms here. Conservative by definition means to conserve. A conservative believes that the tradition and the affirmation of the truth, that is something that should be respected and innovations are suspect. On the other hand, liberals in general terms in both politics and in religion have the opposite opinion, and this comes down in politics to what is now described as the conservative trajectory and the liberal trajectory, and at least in large part during the 20th century that had to do with a lot of things including the size of government, government supervision over the economy, and the amount of regulation, the size of the administrative state. Those became big distinctions between conservatives and liberals.

But by the time you get to the end of the 20th century, there are fundamental moral issues that are at stake. Many of those moral issues wouldn’t have been questioned in the first part of the 20th century, but they were inevitable by the second half of the 20th century. And so to be liberal in political terms, by the end of the 20th century meant not only that you’re for big government and for income redistribution and for growth of the administrative state and regulation, government involvement in the economy, you also are almost assuredly pro-abortion and an advocate for the sexual revolution, in one way or another, you tend towards consistency.

On the conservative side, it was the opposite. It was the effort to conserve ordered liberty, the effort to conserve even the textual authority of the constitution, to conserve the most fundamental elements of society, most importantly, marriage and the family, protecting the family from government intrusion, protecting community at the most organic level. All of these were conservative affirmations. Free market by and large, not just because of some kind of devotion to the market and to capitalism, but because of the fear of, well, just even the concentration of sin in terms of a government-run economy which turns out not only to be usually very inefficient but also rather repressive in terms of individual liberty.

But by the same token, at the end of the 20th century, to be conservative generally meant that you define marriage as the union of a man and a woman, that you are far more likely to hold to a pro-life position and that you are far more likely to be very concerned about the sexual revolution, right down to the development of what became known as the LGBTQ movement and its activism. And so by the time you get to say the 21st century, liberal conservative are not just alternative choices in a political context, they are polarities even right down to the most basic questions of morality.

But now we bring in religion, and I’m using that term intentionally. I’m going to say that in general I’m speaking about Christianity and those who consider themselves Christians, identify as Christians. Even as you had a polarization in the politics, you had a polarization in the religious bodies as well. Now the reason I’m saying religious is because it’s not just Catholic and it’s not just Protestant, it’s not just Christian. It’s also most importantly perhaps as an illustration, Jewish. Judaism has undergone its own transformations along these lines. But right now, let’s just look on the Christian side, and here I’m defining Christian by those who identify as Christians. And so among those who identify as Christians, by the time you get not to the end of the 20th century but even to the midpoint of the 20th century, it is clear that even as there are two parties in the political process on the political landscape, two parties that begin to represent two different visions of the nation, and you also have the development of two different trajectories in Christianity, two very different directives. And so you have conservatives and liberals.

Interestingly, early on in terms of the development of the polarization between liberals and conservatives, it wasn’t so much that the liberals called themselves liberals. Some of the early liberals called themselves modernists, and that’s really helpful. And so in the early 20th century on the Protestant side, you had the fundamentalist modernist controversy which turned out to be as Gresham Machen, the Presbyterian stalwart, said so clearly, it’s Christianity versus liberalism, it’s conservative Christianity, which he would say is Christianity, versus liberalism which is, as he pointed out, a whole new religion.

But the modernists were claiming that you have to modernize the faith. We’re living in a set of new intellectual conditions. We know so much more now. With the rise of the German university and higher critical historiography and approaches to the Scripture of higher criticism, you had people who were saying, “Look, we can now look at say what is called Christian Orthodoxy and we can see it as the product of a progressive evolutionary system of religious experience being codified in the doctrines. We understand the Bible to be primarily a human book about which religious claims are made. It is not the Word of God. It is rather a human product of religious experience and is to be interrogated and studied as such.”

By the time you get to the 1920s, the Protestant liberals are ready to deny the validity and the importance of virtually any doctrine. One of the leading issues of controversy was the virgin birth of Christ. And so you had a liberal such as Harry Emerson Fosdick, famous pastor in New York City who just famously made very clear he didn’t believe there was any historical validity to the claim of the virgin birth of Christ. And on the other side you had conservatives who said, “This is not only revealed in Scripture, it’s revealed in scripture as an objective truth that is actually central to the understanding of who Christ is and central to his mission in terms of the substitutionary atonement.” And of course, that’s the point.

By the time you get to the middle of the 20th century, the liberals, the modernists as they first called themselves, they modernized themselves right out of any connection to orthodox Christianity. They still got the symbols. They still sometimes sing the hymns, but in terms of the theology, if it wasn’t thrown entirely overboard it was just put in a category of provisionally true until proved to be false. It is interesting that on the Catholic side of the ledger, at least in terms of the American context, the crisis seemed to come later, and part of that is because of the power of the magisterium of the Catholic Church, the power of the papacy. In the 19th century you had some powerfully conservative pontiffs and you had some even developments of doctrine on the Roman Catholic side towards just concretizing a more conservative position right down to papal authority, even infallibility, et cetera.

And then you get to the Catholic Church in the 20th century, and it’s interesting that especially beginning in the European context, but also coming over to the American Catholic context, the term “modernist” played out in something of a parallel with what happened in the Protestant world. And so you had the modernists or the modernizers, and Germany, by the way, is not by accident one of the places where this modernizing tendency and Catholicism began, even as the same was true even earlier among Protestants.

When it comes to Pope Francis, you need to understand that you have a lot of headlines right now. You have people who are being quoted as saying, “Look, the great failure of Pope Francis is that even though he insinuated changes on the Church’s teachings about say the sinfulness of homosexuality, he didn’t actually change the teachings.” Even though you had Pope Francis famously asking, “Who am I to judge when it came to the sinfulness of homosexuality?” and of course the response is, you’re the Pope. But nonetheless, we talked about that already. The point is that there were people who wanted him to move from who am I to judge to making the statement that the Catholic Church will change its position, and then following through in terms of the dogmatic authority of the Roman Catholic Church. He didn’t do that. He didn’t open the priesthood to women. He didn’t even open what in Catholic teaching is the diaconate. He didn’t even open the office of deacon to women.

And so there were all these gestures, and one of the most noticeable of these, by the way, is one that just gets mentioned in the press when you had the internment of the Pope’s body outside, by the way, not inside the Vatican at a major church with significance to the Virgin Mary that was very important to this pope, he wanted to be buried there, and the interesting thing is is that by his own invitation there were transgender persons there as a part of the recognition of his love and his influence, and they wanted to state their appreciation for how he had reached out. This just honestly for this Protestant becomes a very vexing issue because if there’s anything that would seem to be absolutely clear in Roman Catholic doctrine, and especially as reflected in the elucidation of natural law, it would be male and female. So just looking at the transgender representation there, the press was of course just very excited about it. It just looked to me like one last slap at the doctrinal authority of his own church.

Part III

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A Forced Decision: In the Modern Age, Christians Must Take a Stand

But my larger point is that when you look at conservative and liberal hopes and fears for the Roman Catholic Church, they’re very much in parallel to the hopes and fears of conservative evangelicals as we look at liberal Protestantism as well. One of the things we note, and this was something that again I’m going to credit Gresham Machen, he wasn’t the only conservative to see this clearly but he certainly did see it clearly back in the 1920s, when he pointed out that liberalism is not just a variant of Christianity as it claims, it’s actually an entirely new religion. Thus, the title of his book was Christianity and Liberalism, not Christianity and Liberal Christianity.

But his point was that once you adopt this idea that the faith is to be modernized and that we as human beings have the authority, and for that matter even the fundamental insight to know how to modernize the faith, we’re going to update the Bible, we’re going to update the gospel, then eventually everything gets updated. The “acids of modernity” as the thinker Walter Whitman called them, they’re going to burn through everything. They’re going to burn through every doctrine. They’re going to burn not only through the inerrancy of scripture, they’re going to burn through the virgin birth. They’re going to burn through the physical resurrection of Christ, and they are then going to burn through marriage and male and female. The acids of modernity will dissolve everything. And thus in liberal Protestantism, that’s basically what’s already happened. There’s virtually nothing left in terms of established Christian doctrine or continuity with the faith once for we’re all delivered to the saints. Instead, it’s the rainbow flag out front.

But it’s really interesting to compare that to that front page Wall Street Journal article I mentioned. It’s by Joshua Chaffin and Aaron Zitner. It is very interesting because very honestly this article points out that if you’re looking for numbers of Catholics, and in particular young Catholics in North America, you’re not going to find them in liberal Catholic precincts. You’re going to find them in conservative Catholic circles, and that’s because who’s there. You want to go to the seminaries in North America, you’re not going to find liberals there now. By and large, you’re going to find conservative young men training for the priesthood, and that’s because if you are going to train for the priesthood at this point in world history, why would you do so if you’re a liberal?

And that gets to another point. The same thing would be true on any major very serious evangelical campus. The students are very conservative. I’m very happy to report that. The students are very conservative. I’m very glad to report that. And they’re conservative I think for two reasons, and the future of the church in this sense is conservative for the same two reasons. And the reason is, number one, the liberals are leaving. I don’t mean they’re just leaving campuses and leaving congregations, I mean they are leaving. You look at the historic churches of what’s been called the Protestant mainline and their big losses, they’re not really to conservative churches. They’re losses to nothing at all, to no religion, to just non-church attendance, non-affiliation. Some have certainly moved into more conservative circles, but by and large, they’ve simply moved off the map.

On the other hand, even in the 1970s, there was a famous book on why conservative churches are growing. Well, even in a secular age, quite honestly, a lot of conservative churches aren’t growing as they once grew, but you know what? Where you do find people, you’re likely to find them in conservative churches. Where you’re going to find young people who are committed to the Christian faith, you’re going to find them in conservative churches. The parallelism right now is not by accident. We’re in the same culture. We’re in the same theological predicament, Catholic and Protestant. We’re finding out where everybody is, and that’s becoming very, very clear as a pattern on both sides of the Protestant Catholic divide. That’s one of the reasons why you have conservative Catholics and conservative Protestants, conservative evangelicals, deep in conversation with one another because just as Machen predicted over a century ago, what you have is a very different understanding of the context.

At this point, why would a conservative Protestant waste time talking to a liberal Catholic? The only Catholic worth talking to, and this can be very profitable indeed, is a conservative Catholic, the two who can respect each other in this equation. Well, let’s just say it’s probably true on the other side as well. Liberal Catholics and liberal Protestants probably love each other for their liberalism, and conservative Protestants and conservative Catholics have so much in common in terms of the battles we’re fighting, and quite honestly, the shape of many of the challenges that we face that it’s not that the Evangelical Catholic divide among conservatives is narrower than it once was. It’s not that the divide is more shallow rather than deeper than it once was. No, it’s actually there and respected by conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals.

But when you look at the great Venn diagram of the culture, when it comes to the big issues of the day, it’s not by accident that conservative Catholics and the conservative evangelicals show up on the same front lines. It’s also not a surprise that in Judaism it’s pretty much the same picture. Now much of Judaism in Europe and in North America shifted to an extremely liberal position, and oddly enough, that was also true of most of the founders of Israel in 1948, far more secular in terms of their Judaism, even if they were decided Zionists when it came to the nation of Israel. It’s also interesting that in the 19th century into the 20th century, you had developments in Judaism. Reform Judaism, much like liberal Protestantism, conservative Judaism was somewhere in the middle, but it has moved I think arguably not so much in some of its traditions, but in its theology also to the left. And then there’s Orthodox Judaism, and Orthodox Judaism continues precisely because it is Orthodox Judaism.

Oh, and there’s some ironies here as well as we conclude our thoughts on these things today, let me tell you that sterility in theology tends to lead to sterility when it comes to the household as well. It’s not an accident that if you want to look in Israel for who’s having the babies, it is not the secular tradition in Israel. It’s not that population having the babies. It is the Orthodox Jewish couples and families who are having babies. They see it as their religious duty. They see it as their joy. The same thing is true among conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals. You want to find babies? Do not go to a mainline Protestant church. They really don’t need much of a nursery. Meanwhile, and I’m glad to say I get to see this in my own church, it looks like an absolute fertility explosion with young couples and sweet families, and it just makes us very, very happy.

Theology is so relevant that you look at a snapshot of a congregation these days, you have a pretty good idea of whether it’s conservative or liberal, because look for the children and then also look for the men. Look at the congregational picture and see not only who’s there but who’s not.

The Wall Street Journal article, by the way, sets the stakes very clearly. When you look at the choice for a new pope for the Roman Catholic Church, well, there are so many that want the Catholic Church to go in an even more liberal direction, but how in the world they can pull that off when the attendance, the patterns in Roman Catholicism are that it is the conservatives who have the crowds. The pattern is also there, it is the conservatives who have the people. The fastest growing area for Catholicism right now is symbolically and substantially Africa, and let’s just put it this way, when it comes to theology, Africa doesn’t do liberal. For historic reasons, we can all understand liberal in Catholicism as in Protestantism means Germany, the German university, and conservatism on both sides increasingly means Africa. And on both sides, the residual and continuing strength of conservative theology and conservative congregations in North America, particularly in the United States.

I was in a rather heated conversation one time with a liberal Protestant leader who said to me, he said, “I don’t like the way you frame everything as all or nothing.” And I said, “Well, I can understand your resistance, but when you look at the denomination you serve, you started out saying it’s not all or nothing, and what you’ve got now is nothing.” It turns out that when you’re talking about the faith once we’re all delivered to the saints, it is over time verifiably true, it’s all or nothing.

Part IV

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Canadians Go to the Polls – We Will Watch This Election Closely

But for today, finally, we recognize that our listeners in Canada are going to the polls today, Canadian election. It is a big election in terms of Canadian history, and it’s going to demand our attention. Hopefully, we will know the results over the next day or so. As in every case, elections have consequences. Big issues are at stake, and we’ll track those issues with you.