A Fourth Counterfeit: The Quietist Gospel

Last week we investigated Trevin Wax's book Counterfeit Gospels.  It was a week where I traveled much.  Thankfully the travel is done for a couple of weeks!  Now we return to Wax's argument.

Wax sees the gospel as a three legged stool.  Each leg is vital for the stool to stand and function.  The first two counterfeits we investigated reject key elements of the first leg of the stool, which is the gospel story.   These counterfeits include the therapeutic gospel and the judgmentless gospel.  The next two counterfeits reject the second leg of the stool.  They include the moralistic gospel and today's counterfeit, the quietist gospel.

The quietist-gospel counterfeit "strikes at the heart of the gospel as a public announcement and turns the good news into a message that is only personal.  The counterfeit says that the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ no longer address the world, but only the individual." (131)

Honestly, most of the circle in which I run do not believe we struggle with this counterfeit.  If anything, we think we struggle with the opposite extreme and make works of mercy and social engagement part of the gospel equation.  We will look at this counterfeiting tendency in the future.  We will also see that the quietist-gospel counterfeit is much more subtle than we thought.  In fact, all of us have a tendency to make our faith all about us.

To help illustrate how these folks can miss the bus, I will retell a story Wax recounts from Erwin Lutzer (nothing better than third person accounts!).  I find this story both challenging and sad!  It is a first-person account of a man who lived in Germany during WWII.

I lived in Germany during the Nazi Holocaust.  I considered myself a Christian.  We heard stories of what was happening to the Jews, but we tried to distance ourselves from it, because, what could anyone do to stop it?

A railroad track ran behind our small church and each Sunday morning we could hear the whistle in the distance and then the wheels coming over the tracks.  We became disturbed when we heard the cries coming from the train as it passed by.  We realized that it was carrying Jews like cattle in the cars!

Week after week the whistle would blow.  We dreaded to hear the sound of those wheels because we knew that we would hear the cries of the Jews in route to a death camp.  Their screams tormented us.

We knew the time the train was coming and when we heard the whistle blow we began singing hymns.  By the time the train came past our church we were singing at the top of our voices.  If we heard the screams, we sang more loudly and soon we heard them no more.

Years have passed and no one talks about it anymore.  But I still hear that train whistle in my sleep.  God forgive me; forgive all of us who called ourselves Christians yet did  nothing to intervene.

(Wax, 129-130)

I told you it was a powerful story!  It testifies to what happens when we make the most powerful narrative of all- the true Gospel of God- merely a personal story.  I am afraid that all of us struggle with such tendencies in our culture of "self."  We forget that people our perishing without Christ, and we make our faith and our communities about serving our needs; or even worse, as instruments to protect us from the evil outside world.

What is the cure?  The gospel has implications for all of life.  Yes, political agendas can co-opt the real gospel.  We should guard against such foolishness!  That must not keep us from realizing that the true gospel will impact all of life.  The real gospel message is not merely true to me.  It is True Truth!