Apologists Without Converts, and Clouds Without Rain
At a certain point we need to acknowledge there's little sign of spiritual life in Reformed apologetics.
On several occasions in the last few years, I looked with great disappointment as a promising looking cloud passed over my midwestern farm. With dust trails following cars in the distance miles away, and lingering in the air so long it seemed supernatural, the ground remained parched…dry…thirsty…cracked…needy. A rumble of thunder in the distance provided no reprieve, like a gasp with no breath.
I wonder how many farmers over the years, stood on that same piece of ground, with tears in their eyes toward the heavens of passing clouds, and prayed that the God of Weather show kindness to his creatures below. Surely, more than a few.
GOD, GIVE US RAIN
Although most recall the epistle of Jude when they hear “clouds without rain,” Jude was drawing upon the Proverbs 25:14, “Like clouds and wind without rain
is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give.”
Jude then draws from this when he writes of prophets and preachers who promise the power of God, but fail to deliver it.
These are spots in your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever (Jude 12-13)
Jude spoke of false teachers who creep into the church, convincing people of their authority and gravitas, but who can bring nothing good. In verse 11, Jude says they’ve committed the sin of Balaam, which is prophesying for the highest bidder. And like Balaam, some of what they say might even be of God, but that’s because God can speak through stones, asses, and arrogant fools.
Jude also likens them to Cain, who attacked his brother. Let that soak in. They attack their brother. I’ve seen a bit of that online, lately.
He goes on to call them, “murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men's persons in admiration because of advantage.”
Or to paraphrase, they talk fancy, and they complain a lot and do it fluently, and they’re doing it to be well thought of by all the right people.
I don’t know that a fluent talker has ever made a significance in my spiritual walk. Fluency is not an impediment to spiritual growth or renewal, of course, but whatever the Holy Spirit does it’s in spite of the preacher, and not because of him. The man who baptized me, Bro. Bob White, was not particularly fluent, but that never minded to hillbillies no how. I remember him telling me, “I can’t learn you the guitar, you got to learn yourself.”
Anyway, this man - in a long line of men without seminary degrees who impacted me - wrote his own songs to sing to the congregation with his gee-tar. The one I recall had these lyrics…
Bring down the rain, Lord. Bring down the rain, Lord. Bring down, the Holy Ghost rain.
Frankly, that’s all I recall. I was five, give me break. And no, he didn’t mean it in a Pentecostal way. It’s not all that different from this other one by D.W. Whittel (1883)…
There shall be showers of blessing,
Precious reviving again;
Over the hills and the valleys,
Sound of abundance of rain.
The thing about rain is, you don’t know you need it, until you needed it a week ago. Our spirits are funny things, sometimes. We live in our spirits, and can’t take them off, and can never crawl out of them, but they’re usually suppressed. We don’t listen enough to them.
Almost invariably, since I was a very young man, I’d look around at some point in early Spring and see the green had come. And then, I’d cry. No, not like a weeping, embarrassing, blue-haired “Kamala Harris just lost the election” cry, but an “Old Yeller just died, and my eyes are watering” cry. I think that winter, with all of its cold and drabness, wears on a man’s soul more than he realizes. Perhaps it’s even subliminal, but when he looks around and sees that for roughly the six-thousandth time God has made the earth awaken from its winter slumber, it feeds a part of his spirit he didn’t know was hungry. He missed it, and maybe didn’t even know it.
WHERE DID THE WATER IN REFORMED CLOUDS GO?
When I say that I’m Reformed, I mean it in the colloquial sense. Yes, I hold to the Second London Baptist Confession line-by-line without an exception - and that’s a Reformed Confession - but for this article I use the term as most people understand it; a theologically serious, Calvinistic, doctrine-focused, get-off-my-lawn Protestant Christianity.
My friends, there’s something sick among us. There’s a cancer, or maybe an infection, or possibly a puss-filled cyst underneath the skin of Reformed evangelicalism. It’s a general malaise, a gangrene, a low-testosterone lethargy, or some other kind of metaphoric ailment that has us generally unwell but I’m not sure we’re listening to the spirit that is crying out within us that something’s not okay.
We discussed this, or perhaps it was just me, in the Bulldogmatic Polemics Round Table last night (a weekly Zoom gathering for paid subscribers to this Substack, or paid subscribers to Protestia Insider). I pointed out that if we were to imagine the most renown, best-known Internet apologists in Reformed Evangelicalism, you wouldn’t be able to find more converts brought to faith by their ministries than you have fingers on one hand. Why is this?
I can name you Hillbilly preachers, many who are Calvinists, who absolutely give the appearance of being unlearned in their twang, unsophisticated diction, and characteristic drawls that they acquired in a holler somewhere who don’t preach anywhere without the Holy Spirit doing something (Harold Smith, who I used to call the Spurgeon of Arkansas, but now prefer to think of him as the Whitfield of the Rural South), is one such example. Of course, if you listen for more than five minutes, you’ll see their theological acumen is second to none, if you can get past the y’alls and you'uns.
But when you dial the Internet to smarmy, know-it-all theologians sitting in wood-paneled offices stacked to the ceiling with books on display like nerds show their Star Wars paraphernalia above their race car bed, you grow quite impressed quite quickly with their air of doctrinal pretension. But no matter how many lectures they give, and no matter how busy their speaking schedule, one thing you don’t hear about are converts to Jesus as a fruit of their ministry.
At first, this seems amiss. If someone is accurately exegeting the Scriptures, paying careful attention to give the Text honor, applying themselves to dutiful doctrine, dispelling myths and heresies, and expositing the Scriptures as they were intended to be exposited, how could God not move?
I think the question is the problem, as though God is a genie or tribal deity who can be summoned with smoke and a certain dance, or conjured as though a spirit by the right incantations.
I watched Paul Washer, one evening about a decade ago, pace back and forth asking God aloud, “What do they need?” He was speaking of the crowd gathered in the Eastside Baptist Church, and asked me that question before his pacing commenced. I told him I had no idea.
But as Washer paced, and pleaded with God, he appeared to me like a youth pastor about to approach the pulpit for the first time. He had a black binder with sermons, but he didn’t open it. He was searching for the wisdom of God, a direction from the Holy Ghost, and it appeared as though he was unsettled. This man, who had preached to crowds like Whitefield’s, seemed concerned about what he would say to a crowd of 150 people.
What is often missing from the Reformed evangelical niche is not good doctrine, or correct theology, or proper exegesis. What is missing is humility, and fear. What is missing is the recognition that without the Holy Spirit’s moving, we are not preaching to people…we are preaching to inanimate bricks of hardened clay.
None of this should surprise us, if only as Reformed believers we trusted the Scripture we neglect to mediate upon. Consider this, and its implications for why - as Ravenhill asked - revival tarries.
“…God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humbled (James 4:6)”
Pride is an antidote to effectual preaching; it is a vaccine against the Holy Ghost. The Third Person of the Trinity may very well move through a prideful preacher, but nothing suggests that he makes a habit of it.
REFORMED EVANGELICALISM CAN GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW. BUT IT CANNOT GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED.
If I didn’t believe my Confession was an adequate picture of God’s doctrines, I wouldn’t hold to it. I was not born into it, I chose it. But that aside, the correct theological answers cannot replace the Holy Ghost. This isn’t minimizing the importance of correct theological hours, but it neither transcends nor negates the spirit of humility from which revivals are born.
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