All Things, Even This?
A Comment on the Editorial
There’s a debate among evangelical Protestants, and it goes something like this: “Should we blur the line, or make it as clear as possible?” This way of putting things owes something to Fuller Theological Seminary and the “Church Growth” gurus of the 1970s and 1980s. They drew on the social sciences to develop their theories, and people who have been influenced by them have given us “worship services” that include TED Talks for Jesus, laser light shows, and “seeker-sensitivity.”
The Apostle Paul did indeed say, “I become all things to all men, that by all means, I might save some” (1 Cor. 9:22). And while that might sound like line-blurring, the final clause tells us that he hoped at least some people would cross a very clear line and join him on his side of it.
I’m afraid that Fiducia Supplicans has blurred a line, and ironically, it has done so by parsing truth too neatly. As Carl Trueman put it recently, it is a “fog of distinctions.”
Canon lawyers assure us that nothing’s been lost. But there would be no need for their assurances if Fiducia Supplicans had spray-painted the old boundary stones neon orange instead of grass green.
What the world needs now, and badly, is a clear distinction between the way that leads to life and the way that leads to death. Fiducia Supplicans doesn’t help with that at all.
On the Areopagus, Paul demonstrated what “becoming all things” looks like (Acts 17). Addressing Epicurean and Stoic philosophers like a philosopher himself, he begins with truths that reasonable people can agree on. Then, demonstrating his knowledge of those schools (he was from Tarsus after all, a center of Stoicism), he brings up the thing that he knew they would object to at the very last moment—namely, that a man had been raised from the dead.
That drew a clear line, and Paul spelled out the implications and said, “Repent!” And some did, but others did not (17:32).
I’ve known men who have made 1 Corinthians 9:22 their “life verse” (as we put it in certain corners of Evangelicalism). Some of them have apostatized. That can happen when you blur the lines. I’m afraid that Fiducia Supplicans will lead to more of that.
C. R. Wiley is a member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters and has written for numerous periodicals. He is the author of The Household and the War for the Cosmos (Canon Press, 2019) and Man of the House (Wipf and Stock, 2017), as well as short fiction and the first book in a young-adult fantasy series, The Purloined Boy, which was republished by Canon Press in 2017. He is a Senior Editor of Touchstone.
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