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World Evangelical Allianz congratulates ERF Media on its 50th Anniversary

The World Evangelical Allianz has officially congratulated ERF Media, the German branch of TransWorldRadio, on its 50th anniversary. The welcome address, signed by the International Director of the World Evangelical Allianz, Geoff Tunnicliffe, and the two World Evangelical Allianz spokespeople Christine and Thomas Schirrmacher, was read by Thomas Schirrmacher at the reception given by the Board of ERF Media and is now officially available on the WEA website in both English and German.

This global association, which speaks for 420 million Evangelical Christians, above all thanked ERF Media for bringing Christians from the most diverse range of backgrounds together for the sake of the proclamation of the Gospel. For this reason the ERF justifiably carries its original name Gospel Broadcasting. The ERF has successfully distanced itself from forces that would have prevented a common, cross-border proclamation of the Gospel. In doing so ERF set boundaries, on the one hand, “in front of Christians who admittedly want ecumenism and alliance but no proclamation of the Gospel” and on the other hand “before those who want to proclaim the Gospel but who do not want to countenance an alliance, a coalition of all Christians, a bundling of forces.”

“ERF Media,” according to the words of the welcome address, “in spite of its high degree of dependence on hearers from all camps, has in this point made a great achievement over its 50 years. It has played a significant role in bringing about a situation where German Christians stand together with more variety, breadth, and strength than in 1959!”

Download of the English Text of the Welcome Address as PDF here.

Against the Self-Secularization of European Christianity

This is my foreword in the German edition of: David A. Noebel. Understanding the Times – The Collision of Today’s Competing Worldviews (Kampf um Wahrheit – Die bedeutendsten Weltanschauungen im Vergleich. 504 pp. Resch-Verlag: Gäfeling, ISBN 978-3-935197-41-0).

Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual act of worship. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. (Rom 12:1-2)

Paul calls upon Christian to continually let themselves be “transformed” by “renewing” their thinking (Romans 12:2). That is the only way for the Christian to avoid being conformed to the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age (Romans 12:1). For that reason, the Zeitgeist is not something that is found ‘out there in the evil world,’ but rather in our minds. Only those who are consistently prepared to conduct self-critiques of what the standards are that they are employing in their thinking, and where they lead, can change their thinking and with that, their actions. Peter calls upon Christians to be prepared to give a response to all those who ask them to give an account (2 Peter 3:14-17). Only those people who first give an account to themselves, and thereafter are ready to invest time in understanding the intellectual edifice that others possess, are in a position to sensibly answer the questions of adherents of other worldviews.

At the time of National Socialism the comparison of worldviews was so little developed that many people were not aware of the fact that Hitler, when he purposely referred again and again to the fact that God had created the world for a battle between the races, was defining and configuring all areas of live completely differently than within the Christian faith and within democracy. Many Christians knew their own worldview too little (e.g., the consequences of belief in a Creator who was not partial, even with respect to the most distant ramifications in social life) and as well spent too little time coming to fundamentally understand other worldviews, to answer them, or by disclosing their contents to warn about them.
North America and Europe are indeed closely tied on the basis of cultural history. Yet religiously and on the basis of their worldviews, they are certainly growing further apart. Europe, in spite of the fact that there has been some recent reignited Christianity in the wake of the worldwide threat of Islamic terrorism, is on the whole still becoming increasingly Dechristianized. This is visible via the disinterest individuals demonstrate as well as via legislative measures. In the USA, on the other hand, Christianity in the USA is experiencing a new bloom. In the USA, religion as expressed in the form of a ‘civil religion,’ has always had a firm place in politics and in the public eye. And this is in spite of the fact that there is a strict separation of church and state in contrast to Central Europe. The presently strong growth in religous life, for instance the strengthening of Evangelicals among Caucasians and Afro-Americans and of the Catholic Church among Latinos, is, for better or for worse, again making Religion a politically meaningful factor. In this connection what is unfortunately overlooked is that the various atheistic schools of thought are better organized and in the public sphere are significantly more aggressive. Furthermore, their distinct confession is much more evident.

In the USA, worldview discussions are more prominently conducted in public than here in Europe. One thinks, for example, of the discussion surrounding evolution or creation, or, as the case may be, ‘intelligent design.’ Debates that are geared towards the media between leading professors and before fully packed lecture halls are widespread at American universities. In the process Christians discuss with atheists, Catholics with Protestants, Muslims with Christians, evolutionists with creationists, opponents of abortion with proponents of abortion, socialists with capitalists, opponents and proponents of capital punishment, and many, many more. For this reason the comparison of religions and worldviews is the topic of many publications, while we in Europe shy away from direct confrontation and favor monographs or lobbying and infiltration of institutions in order to propagate a worldview. For such comparisons one has to start with some specific conception of a worldview. If one wants to compare Islam and Christianity, given all the inevitable differentiation, one has to just formulate some sort of typical position on both sides. This makes the comparison more manageable and distinct. That surely has the disadvantage that the actual everday life of the millions of followers might possibly look somewhat different. On the other hand, the excessive differentiation in Europe often leads to a situation where no actual comparison takes place and, with respect to central questions, everything becomes arbitrary and is over-discussed.

If with this book one wants to take a US classic in terms of worldview comparisons and make it accessible for European and German readers, then this background needs to be kept in mind. At the same time one has to bear in mind that the positions are in part documented with American authors and texts as well as with German ‘classics’, eg when it comes to the fathers of Marxism. However, there are texts referred to that, while they are available in Germany, are not as aggressively disseminated as confessional texts as they are in the USA. Examples include Humanist Manifestos.
What for the German reader might seem more novel is to publicly avow one’s own worldview, in particular when it does not have to do with an official religion. I would like to demonstrate this using the example of the three Humanist Manifestos, which the author uses as a basis for the presentation of secular humanism. Naturally, this form of humanism is also widespread in Germany, but its organized form is small in numbers. This means that it remains a rather private mindset, which one does not necessarily publicly and stridently confess. Additionally, it is found among people who officially are aligned with other worldview or religious groupings, for which reason one often finds numerous hybrid forms. Christianity is often rarely unrecognizable when compared to its ‘opponents. That is a fact that the highest representative of Protestantism in Germany, Biship Wolfgang Huber, with respect to his own history aptly described as ‘self-secularization.3 Worldview opponents of Christianity frequently function within the churches, and devout Christians often instead find that their field of activity lies outside of the big churches. For this reason the line of separation we find between worldviews here in Germany is optically less apparent.

The Protestant theologian Helmut Thielicke defines ‘worldview’ in his Theological Ethics as follows: “With worldview we understand the attempt to subsume all worldly phenomena under a final subject matter, that, as a theory of everything, provides those phenomena with meaning. With this, all areas of life are brought down to a common denominator, regardless of whether one is speaking about understanding history, nature, science, or art.”4 Even though Thielicke defines worldview as distinct from religion, religions have precisely the same function. The only difference is that the final ‘topic’ in religion is transcendent nature. There something is chosen which stands over the world as the final fixed point and is personified more or less according to the type of religion.

Worldviews emanate in all the directions of the various areas of life. This is for the most part more apparent to Americans than it is to Europeans. However, this applies in Europe and Germany just as it does overall. This book helps to think through the consequences for all segments of society and science on the basis of a range of important worldviews. This moves one away from what are mostly diversionary discussion – discussions of minor problems in place of discussions the major presuppositions lying behind them -, which we in Germany love. Namely, we often discuss very intensively in detail, without disclosing that different consequences arise from completely different presuppositions. The worldviews of most German politicians remain a secret and it is preferred to act as though their suggestions and basic approaches are based on pure reflection and a knowledge of the facts. In reality most politicians just implement their worldview, which is all the more easily done, depending on how little they name their worldviews and have to justify them. I wish for all readers that they with Paul will self-critically reflect upon their own thinking, compare this with the comprehensive outlines of other worldwiews, and then work out an elaborate foundation for their life and act accordingly.

Evangelicals and Ethics

The following article was published by the German magazine ‘idea’ as part of a series of essay “Evangelicals – who they really are”and has been translated by Dr. Richard McClary (Nuremberg)

(idea) Evangelicals represent the largest movement within Christianity after the Roman Catholic Church. Worldwide counts are that around 460 million Christians are included in the total of theological conservatives, the majority of which are members of Protestant national churches or free churches. In recent months the German press has for the most part published critical reports about Evangelicals. idea has asked well-known personalities in Germany to describe Evangelical theology and devoutness from their point of view. Prof. Dr. Thomas Schirrmacher, Rector of the Martin Bucer Seminary and one of the best-known Evangelical ethicists in Germany, reacts against a one-sided view of Evangelical ethics in the public sphere.

A Caricature

When the Green Party politician Volker Beck started a socalled ‘small inquiry’ in the German federal parlament into the ‘Christival’, a large evangelical youth convention, because of supposed workshops against abortion and homosexuality, one could have gotten the impression that Evangelicals are above all against abortion and practicing homosexuality. As a matter of fact, it had been a few years earlier that the then president of the Gnadauer Association, Kurt Heimbucher, in making reference to the large number of state assisted abortions, refused receipt of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Aside from that, Evangelicals have at all times been against practicing homosexuality. But does being pro-family and pro-child, and being against any sort of premarital sex actually capture the ethics of the almost 500 million Evangelicals around the world?

The reality looks different. Such a one-sided picture of Evangelicals overlooks that it was the Evangelicals who brought about the first movement against slavery in England and in the USA. It was in this connection that the term ‘Evangelical‘ was even first used in England. Such caricatures overlook that Evangelicals were at the forefront in the fight against racism, for example in India, and that at a time when most churches still celebrated the Lord’s Supper separated according to caste. It overlooks that a conservative Evangelical theologian such as Peter Beyerhaus and a youth movement such as the ‘Young Christians’ Offensive’ (Offensive Junger Christen, or OJC) were massively engaged against apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s even though they rejected all violent forms of overthrowing the practice. A one-sided picture completely overlooks that in the 19^th century the Evangelical Alliance was the first large religious movement worldwide that called for the right to freedom of religion, long before the large churches did this. In this connection they sent delegations to the Turkish Sultan and to the Russian Czar as well as to the rulers of their home countries.

Do the caricatures arouse the idea that the founder of the West German Evangelical Alliance (Westdeutsche Evangelische Allianz), Theodor Christlieb, took steps around the world against the devastating and so-called Indo-British opium trade between India and China, which included action all the way up to the British Parliament? Does one know that in a spectacular manner Christlieb had German and French Christians hug during the Franco-Prussian War and pleaded for peace, something that was decried as treason back at home? Does anyone have a clue that Evangelicals have always and up until today respectfully but critically opposed the state – and not just since abortion, pornography and homosexuality have been liberalized? Does the caricature explain why the UN General Secretary recently praised the ‘Micah Initiative’ of the global alliance in New York, because it belongs to the largest supporters of the UN program to halve poverty and mobilize enormous efforts against poverty around the world – aside from gigantic and respected aid organizations such as World Vision?

Ethics as Sanctification

For starters, ethics for Evangelicals is – in the good tradition of pietism and the movements of awakening, but also in the tradition of reformed and charismatic awakenings – ‘sanctification.’ Ethics means first of all that God in Christ forgives every sinner und that every individual can start a new life. For Evangelicals, ethics also means that every Christian sins and for that reason has to struggle for sanctification. Sanctification cannot be lived out of oneself; rather, every individual Christian lives by the power of the Holy Spirit. On account of this, every Evangelical ethic begins with self-critique, with the awareness that every Christian can think and act wrongly, and that only God can change something about that.

The connection between ethics and sanctification is demonstrated in the German Evangelical Alliance’s 1972 confession of faith. It confesses “the divine inspiration of the Holy Scripture, their complete reliability, and highest authority in all questions of faith. . .” It continues this sentence, however, by supplementing: “. . . and in the way life is conducted.” The relationship to the Bible, which bears the testimony of Christ to us, comes to a head in life as it is lived out, as is stated in the central verses II Timothy 3:16-17. Furthermore, the confession refers “to the work of the Holy Spirit, which effects conversion and new birth in an individual, lives in the believer, and enables the believer to experience sanctification.”

Therefore, for Evangelicals ethical action is an expression of their existence as Christians. It has to do with a ‘life of sanctification” by the Holy Spirit through the gracious action of God and his Spirit.

Evangelicals‘ Social Ethics

In addition to personal ethics, Evangelicals’ social ethics are above all demonstrated in the topics of marriage and family as well as in work with children and youth. Starting from that point, the other fields of social ethics are defined. For this reason, Evangelicals always view the fight against poverty to mean a fight against family poverty and the neglect of women and children. The Bible calls for this all too clearly.

The free church element attracts attention to itself by emphasizing the right of children to freely choose when to be baptized and become members, a precondition of religious freedom. It also shapes the equal rights of lay people, which led early on to a situation among Evangelicals where women were active as missionaries and social reformers, and where locals were able to advance to positions as church leaders earlier than in other Western missionary organizations. The Evangelical movement feeds on pacifist and Baptist churches as well as on the rather state-supporting theology of Reformed churches.

A load-bearing element of the Evangelical social ethic is readily overlooked: the belief that conversion and awakening sets free enormous powers for change. Work around the world among alcoholics (e.g., the Blue Cross [das Blaue Kreuz]), drug addicts (e.g., Teen Challenge), and among inmates (e.g., the Black Cross [das Schwarze Kreuz], or Prison Fellowship International, the latter having been started by the Nixon advisor Charles Colson after his release from prison – Colson had been convicted for his ‘Watergate’ involvement) makes it clear that every Saul – a murderer – can become a Paul.

Evangelicals on the Right and Left

The Evangelical movement feeds on many roots, and today it has enormous bandwidth. The reason for this lies in the fact that the priesthood of all believers and the reticence against centralized church structures are central elements found among Evangelicals. US Presidents Jimmy Carter und George W. Bush were personally shaped by experiences of Evangelical awakenings, and yet their politics could not have been more different.

Recently in Welt Till Stoldt alluded to the fact that there are not only Evangelicals who are right-leaning, but rather that there are ‘left-leaning’ Evangelicals who are, for instance, against the military and big business. This mirrors the worldwide situation, where one has important state-supporting Evangelical ethicists such as Wayne Grudem, Ken Gnanakan, P. Netha, and Mario Aviles. On the other side there are important ‘Evangelical liberation theologians’ such as Ron Sider, René Padilla, and Samuel Escobar.

This also applies similarly to Germany. The leading Evangelical Evangelist Ulrich Parzany was known as the leader of ‘left-leaning Evangelical’ Weigel House in Essen, Germany through the ‘spiritual double-track’ resolution. This was a step taken against NATO’s double-track resolution regarding the stationing medium range ballistic missiles in Germany. On the other hand, other Evangelicals were completely in line with the government’s actions and called for an arms build-up.

Another example also demonstrates the diversity of the movement: for many Evangelicals Evangelical private schools or even homeschooling is indispensible, while others become strongly involved with the idea of a Christian presence in state schools. On this issue no consensus is in sight.

In addition to the many Evangelical ethicists coming out of the tradition of Reformed churches – today, for example, coming out of Korea and South Africa – there are also ‘dispensational ethicists’ – nowadays coming out of Canada and India, for instance. However, if one compares my writings on ethics, which are based on Reformed and early church approaches, with those of Horst Afflerbach, who teaches at the leading Brethren church training center in Wiedenest, one will find in many areas a large amount of agreement.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The ethical strength of the worldwide Evangelical movement is solidarity exercised upon a common basis. It has a strong ability to mobilize, which originates with personal relationships. It is unmistakably active, and so much so, that intellectual reflection regarding it occasionally tends to take a back seat.

There are also weaknesses. Participants in the Evangelical movement conduct too little discourse among themselves – it has only been for only about two years that ethicists, for instance, who teach at Evangelical training centers in German-speaking Europe, have been meeting to conduct annual exchanges at the Institute for Ethics and Values in Gießen, Germany. Specifically in light of the large denominational spectrum among Evangelicals, what is called for is that everyone not behave as though they alone read the Bible correctly, but rather that an open and honest conversation occurs.

With the exception of the USA, there is practically nothing invested in true research. Think tanks such as the International Institute for Religious Freedom or the Institute for Life and Family Sciences both date from recent times. There are still too many Evangelicals who oppose any kind of societal involvement whatsoever. The teaching of the ‘prosperity gospel’ has disastrous repercussions on ethical questions such as the fight against poverty or how to address crises.

Only in recent times has there been any success in what shaped the Evangelical Alliance in the 19^th century: to participate in the creation of an international Christian ethic, for instance, through the ‘Micah Initiative’ of the World Evangelical Alliance or through the common formulation of an ethical codex for missions and human rights together with the World Council of Churches and the Vatican.

In terms of publishing there also remains much to do in Germany. At Hänssler Publishing a ‘short and sweet’ series has been released that covers societal topics such as the new lower class, climate change, the Sharia, the multi-cultural society, and eating disorders. At Brunnen Publishing the first volumes in an ‘Ethics and Values’ series have been released. Ethical handbooks authored by Georg Huntemann, Klaus Bockmühl, Horst Afflerbach, and Helmut Burkhardt can be mentioned, yet still too little has been done. In addition, there are a number of topics where there is a need to catch up, for instance in the areas of medical ethics, terminal care, or the abuse of religious power.

In summary, Evangelical ethics cannot be considered exhausted by the topics of abortion and homosexuality. On the contrary, Evangelicals, in their diversity and dissimilarity, have demonstrated a high level of societal involvement at all times. For them, faith in Christ is inseparably connected with ‘right action.’ What is missing is critical reflection and intellectual penetration with respect to ethics. However, the first steps have been taken. Therefore, one can hope that Evangelicals‘ ethical concerns will be presented by the press in a more differentiated manner in the future.

Showing Hospitality: A Different Policy towards Foreigners

My translator Dr Richard McClary just translated a overview over Bibel stories and verses concerning hospitality, which you can download here.

The Bible sees hospitality as a prime way to establish friendship and communion and to give testimony in a real life, wholistic setting. Hospitality is the basic method of peace building and of accepting people from other peoples and faith! Christians in the West have much to learn from Christians worldwide here. This are the results:

• The host can practically prove his love.
• He can get to know new people.
• He can learn about other cultures without traveling.
• He can learn to understand others better.
• He can let everyone know that he loves his enemies.
• He can teach others to love their enemies.
• He can build trust.
• He can win friends.
• He can help preserve peace in the world.
• He can casually communicate the Gospel in practical life.
• He can make it clear that faith in Jesus Christ takes place in practical, everday life and does not only consist of nice words.
• He can take the spasmodic nature out of pastoral discussions.
• He can communicate important truths to his children.
• He can accustom his children to the idea of loving all people.
• He can break himself and others of prejudices.
• He can learn to share and do without.
• And there is much more.