...However, according to T.M. Luhrmann's recent book, When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, there may be a difference between how evangelicals perceive their commitment to the Bible and to what extent it actually influences how they articulate and live their faith.
Luhrmann, a psychological anthropologist at Stanford University, did years of research within the Vineyard movement and discovered a Christianity that was more therapeutic than theological. She provocatively suggests that American evangelicalism has scripted a new narrative, reformulating both problem and solution. "The [new] problem is human emotional pain and the human's own self-blaming harshness;" the gospel is that "God loves you, just as you are, with all your pounds and pimples."...
Sure, we might argue that her sample, while deep, was unfortunately narrow. The Vineyard is hardly representative of evangelicalism. However, I found her conclusions to accurately describe, at least in part, what has been my experience in evangelical churches. In the Baptist, Presbyterian, charismatic Episcopalian, and non-denominational churches I've attended over the past 20 years, I've often found—as Luhrmann did— that "what people want from faith is to feel better than they did without faith."…
This evangelical sensibility was particularly evident to Luhrmann in the small group Bible studies she attended. Most people in that setting favored reading the text for personal application. They didn't seem to share her own curiosities about a passage's context or the intent of its author—"irrepressible scholarliness," as she calls it. "People just did not worry about heresy," she writes. "They worried about making God come alive for them."…
Here's why Biblical commitment remains essential. If we don't stay true to the story as the Bible tells it, Jesus and the cross easily fade from the foreground of faith. Forgiveness is substituted for self-acceptance, and the doctrine of salvation is effectively amputated at the knees.
Redemption, as the Bible describes it, does not only mean that God loves us. The gospel proclaims that God can love us because he punished Jesus for our misdeeds.
That he gave his only begotten son.
"Do we really need authoritative scripts?" David Parker, the scholar whom I introduced at the beginning of this piece, has asked.
Yes—if the historic gospel continues to matter. Do away with the Bible as an "authoritative script," and you do away with the central historical events of the Christian story ¾ the life, death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. If our feelings and experiences become the only arbiter of the knowledge of God, if the Bible merely plays a supporting role to faith, we risk losing out on the powerful truth of the resurrection in favor of a feel-good gospel...
