“The modes of expression are many, but evangelical spirituality will always find a way to declare its adherence to God himself, emphasizing precisely the personal character of it. In view of the way God has thrown open his heart and turned his inner life inside out to be our salvation, how else could the people of the gospel respond? He speaks passionately to us, and we must answer.” 

On, what? OK, a rather odd mouthful of a title. But reading further will explain everything. And let me make one prefatory remark before digging into all this. I have said this before, but there are advantages to having a large library. One advantage which gives me great pleasure is this:

I am reading something and come upon a neat quote. What I especially love is the fact that I do not need to go to a library or a bookstore or online. I can simply walk to the relevant bookcase, pull out the volume, blow off the dust, and read the quote in its surrounding context.

And it just happened again as I was going through one of Doug Wilson’s books. He shared a brief quote from a book penned by Fred Sanders some years ago called The Deep Things of God (Crossway, 2010). The subtitle explains: How the Trinity Changes Everything.

His main thesis is we – especially we evangelicals – have a small view of God and what our salvation and Christian life really entails. And all this greatness comes from our trinitarian God. In Chapter 3 he discusses “So Great Salvation,” based on Hebrews 2:3 (KJV).

He looks at how an appreciation and understanding of our trinitarian God amplifies and extols the wondrous salvation we have in Christ – a salvation too often minimised and deflated by too many evangelicals. We can tend to downsize the gospel, or select just certain aspects of it, instead of embracing its glorious wholeness and beauty.

It is at this point that the Wilson quote of the book about a decadent theological culture comes in. Says Sanders:

[Our] problem is not so much that we’ve distorted the gospel by adding to it or taking away from it. The problem is that we have taken one true element of it and characterized the whole by that part. Our situation is like the legend of the six blind men who encountered the elephant: one leaned against its side and said, “Elephants are like walls.” Another felt its leg and said, “Elephants are like trees,” and so on until each of them had described the elephant as like a snake (the trunk), a spear (the tusk), a fan (the ear), and a rope (the tail). Each of them had grasped something real, but because of their blindness none of them could produce overall descriptions that did justice to the reality. Even combining the six descriptions would not solve the problem, because no matter how you arrange a wall, a tree, a snake, a spear, a fan, and a rope, you will not assemble anything worthy of the name elephant.

 All cultures and subcultures move through stages, and evangelicalism is, among other things, a distinct subculture of Christianity. In cultural terms, a classical period is a time when all the parts of a community’s life seem to hang together, mutually reinforce one another, and make intuitive sense. By contrast, a decadent period is marked by dissolution of all the most important unities, a sense that whatever initial force gave impetus and meaningful form to the culture has pretty much spent its power. Decadence is a falling off, a falling apart from a previous unity. 

Inhabitants of a decadent culture feel themselves to be living among the scraps and fragments of something that must have made sense to a previous generation but which now seem more like a pile of unrelated items.

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