Please Consider Reading the Bible

A Discouraging Glance at American Evangelicalism since the Death of RHE

There’s a lot of crazy stuff out there on the internet today. For some reason, a lot of people were talking a lot about Rachel Held Evans this week, in the midst of arguing about Douglas Wilson and Kevin DeYoung, and the vast number of people on TikTok vaunting how they are beginning to read the Koran. Leaving the question of the relative merits of the Koran to one side, I went back and scrolled around and discovered that I wrote a lot about RHE—both before her death and after. In many ways, it feels like an entirely different world since 2019, because of course, it is. But there were certain things I knew then that are even more true now, and I wish more people would wake up and be afraid of how the church is faring in these latter, hell-shaped times. Here are seven thoughts about the Evangelical world falling into apostasy and ruin.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash

One

The most discouraging thing, for me, about the last ten years is that, though the Episcopal Church offered herself as a living, breathing, desolating illustration of what happens to an institution when the intellectual pacesetters abandon the Bible, no one was very interested in heading the warning. If the purpose of your life is going to serve merely as a warning to others, it would be so nice if some people saw and understood what miseries are lurking around the bend. It would be good if Christians could begin trying to understand what it means when pastors and influencers say vapid and banal things about the Almighty and then take the trouble to learn the lesson. It seemed a few years ago that Southern Baptists and Lutherans and other kinds of historically faithful Christians thought what the Episcopalians did to themselves was bad, but that, because it would never happen to them, they didn’t have to carefully examine the erroneous theology that brought that once great denomination into the dust.

Two

No one wants to think about a slippery slope, because, as you all know, it’s a logical fallacy. So maybe, instead, call it extreme spiritual laziness married to an unwillingness to see what time it is. RHE was a combative, funny writer, and a charismatic person. But one thing she wasn’t able to do was to read the Bible in a coherent way. She wasn’t able to because she didn’t want to. What the Bible says is possible to understand. The Scriptures are so clear, that if you attend to them, you will unhappily discover three things that don’t jive with prevailing assumptions about how things are. These are the three things progressive Episcopalians never liked about the Bible, and were therefore quick to get rid of. If you accept them, you will be hated by a lot of people who might otherwise have been your friends. The three are: