In the mid 2000s when I was trying to resolve a number of spiritual and theological questions, I had a relatively stable routine: Get home from school, grab my CD walkman, grab a CD that would have two new sermons burned on it, and go on a long walk around northeast Lincoln. The preachers I listened to?
Most commonly it was the two Mars Hill pastors: Mark Driscoll and Rob Bell. Sometimes John Piper made an appearance.
That feels like something of a time capsule these days with both Bell and Driscoll locked in a cycle of self-reinvention that isn't altogether surprising once you realize how both of them have always been marketers at their core.
So when I read someone I respect, like Tim Challies, suggest that the popular evangelical writer John Mark Comer reminds him of Rob Bell, I pay attention. I remember Bell quite well. I closely read all of his early books, listened to as many of his sermons as I could get my hands on, and grew increasingly grieved as his theological path and my own diverged so radically over the years. By 2012 or so I began to lose track of him, but from 2005 until 2010 or so I kept close tabs on him and his work and benefitted from some of it.
And, to be fair to Challies, I can see how someone with only a passing familiarity with Comer would see more than a passing resemblance to Bell, if for no other reason than broadly overlapping aesthetics.
That being said, I think Tim's review of Comer gets him badly wrong both because it misreads our current moment and because it is characteristic of a certain cramped method of cultural analysis one can find amongst some North American Calvinists, especially Calvinistic Baptists.
Bell's theological project was heavily inflected by a particular advertising style. When interpreting any advertiser you have to think about who their audience is. For Bell, the answer was mostly young broadly evangelical people who grew up within the American evangelical subculture and found something lacking in it. Indeed, that description accounts for Bell himself: The son of a conservative judge, a graduate of Wheaton, and planting his church out of a Grand Rapids megachurch. Virtually everything Bell did was derivative of evangelicalism, but with aesthetic and stylistic tweaks that made it feel somehow both safe and fresh.
The difficulty is that Bell's theology was so aesthetically geared and so defined by the reaction against evangelicalism that it had no stable intellectual or theological center. It only had aesthetics and reaction. And so over time the aesthetic and the reactive posture required more and more radical theological innovations to maintain the same style.
One pastor, commenting on the missional movement and attempts to reach millennial evangelicals, made this point very well:
10, 15 years ago through the missional movement there were great thinkers starting to deconstruct the (attractional), "church is all about lights and stage and getting more people" consumeristic spirit to church. They started to deconstruct that with the Bible. They said "that isn't scriptural, this isn't reaching Gen X, this isn't reaching millennials."
But then something shifted and those people started deconstructing orthodoxy. At that point you're off to the races. Progressive Christianity, not for all people but for most, is a stopover on the way to post-Christianity because it can't hold any robust discipleship because it has no ethical stance against the world. You get sucked in.
Who said that? John Mark Comer:
Another pastor, writing about how this progressive shift works in our cultural context, said that
In this cultural context... you have artistic people who tend to be more open minded, they don't like rules, they don't like boxes.... But life without constraints is anarchy and lies and confusion. And there are enough people in the arts that don't like the restrictive nature of orthodoxy. Then there's still enough cultural Christianity that people can view progressivism as this nice shiny thing where you can sleep with whoever you want to sleep with and just be nice to people with different sexual orientations and be non-judgmental and get along. It has this veneer, which isn't real, but it has good PR. And people think there's a future there and I'm living in it. And let me tell you: It's not beautiful up close.
That pastor's name? Also John Mark Comer:
In a sermon on the concept of orthodoxy and its relation to ideology and idolatry, Comer referred to abortion as the largest genocide of our day—bear in mind that he said this in early 2021 from a pulpit in Portland—and then says:
Consider the pride flag flying in front of a church steeple or the new trend of the rainbow used for the clerical collar. The collar was designed to set the pastor or priest apart from the world, it was a visible sign to everyone that this is someone who has chosen a different way of life. It was white to symbolize holiness and in the Catholic tradition to symbolize the priest's celibacy, that this was a man who gave up all expressions of sexuality in order to dedicate himself to serving God by serving the church. What do we make, of that symbol (of all things), made into a symbol for, in all honesty, something very unchristian?
He continued later in the sermon:
The temptation for most of us is to syncretism, to a kind of DIY faith that is a mix of Jesus and sabbath and contemplative prayer and progressive sex ethics and western individualism and consumerism. 'I want a little Jesus, a little Buddha, a little mindfulness, a little neuroscience. I want to put it all together and do my own thing.' That's the great temptation for all of us.
Then:
Billions of people have done life before us. We don't need to start with a blank slate. We don't have to destroy our lives and wreck our marriages and harm our bodies and destroy our nervous system's capacity for intimacy (because we want to live well). If we will read, if we will study, if we will adopt the posture of an apprentice, we can be spared so much pain.
I even found a podcast in which Comer praises Carl Trueman's Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self as the most significant Christian book of the past several years, immediately followed by New York City pastor Jon Tyson quoting Derek Rishmawy's observations about the nature and emptiness of contemporary secularism:
At risk of belaboring the point, I'll share one more example. In this one, Comer attacks progressive theology while name-checking Rob Bell:
Progressive theology can't seem to keep church around it. Progressive theology kills church long-term. It kills faith long-term. It kills discipleship to Jesus long-term. Especially if you don't even believe that the writings of the New Testament are in any way authoritative, if you're where Bell is, who doesn't believe that the New Testament is scripture, doesn't believe that to follow Jesus you have to live under the authority of the Gospels, that's a whole 'nother world that not only takes you past church but past discipleship to Jesus.
The man who stands in a pulpit in Portland in 2021 and calls abortion the largest genocide of our day is not a man headed toward progressivism. It's not even a man one can accuse of "punching right and coddling left." There is no coddling of progressive error in Comer.
Now consider Challies' remarks near the end of his review:
If you, like me, were reading Christian books 20 or 25 years ago, much of this will sound familiar, and rightly so. I would not necessarily say that Comer is creating Emergent 2.0, but I do see that he is advocating something that expresses similar concerns and rejects similar components of Evangelicalism, and something that shares similar influences and is built on a similar foundation. It would seem likely to me, then, that it will eventually trend in a similar direction and suffer a similar fate—becoming first sub-biblical, then unbiblical, and then altogether unrecognizable as a faithful expression of the Christian faith. I hope that I am wrong but, frankly, would be surprised if that proves true.
The mistake that I think Tim is making here might be explained this way: First, he hasn't read Comer closely enough. Second, the cultural heuristic that many Calvinistic Baptists rely on is severely limited, which causes them to misread figures like Comer.
First, regarding how we read Comer: Imagine you are looking at a spreadsheet showing location data for various people in a building. It's highly specific at identifying the mathematical point where a person is standing at a given moment within that building. Now imagine you find two dots basically on top of each other: I think that might be early Rob Bell and John Mark Comer.
But there's something the spreadsheet data can't show you: which way the person is walking. Bell's program was inextricably defined by a directionless deconstruction of evangelicalism; Comer's, in contrast, is defined by an attempt to reckon genuinely with the failings of evangelicalism while still aiming at the goal of following Jesus and submitting our lives to the teachings of Scripture. Because all Bell ultimately had was transgression and aesthetics, Bell became a variant of Nadya Bolz-Weber or Brian McLaren. Comer, meanwhile, has an actual center to his work that guides and limits him. He is a development of Dallas Willard. The difference between the two is not small, and yet the methodological style of some Calvinists, particularly Calvinistic Baptists in my experience, makes it harder for them recognize these distinctions.
This brings me to the other point that came to mind as I read Tim's review: How exactly does one misunderstand a person to such a degree? I think this is part of the answer. Amongst what you might think of as the right flank of the old young, reformed scene there is a tendency to analyze culture in a kind of two-step process:
First, progressivism is assumed to be the single greatest threat to Christian faith today. In some cases it seems to be regarded as the only threat.
Second, the solution to progressivism is thought to be an aggressive, firm polemic relentlessly aimed at tearing down progressive thought which exists alongside a willingness to align with basically anyone who shares your critique of progressivism and with no one who does not. Challies is interesting here, in as much as he's the best possible example of this scene, I think, and yet he has still misunderstood Comer.
The outcome of this style of critique is that anyone who is to your left on anything is suspect, and anyone who engages cultural issues as if there are other problems, or even bigger problems, than progressivism is regarded as wobbly or unreliable. Indeed, they are likely to be dismissed as someone on a trajectory toward progressivism themselves, as Tim suggested is possibly true of Comer.
This, however, is a simplistic framing that implicitly regards "right wing" as safe and without complications or potential dangers. But there are actually conflicts between many forms of right wing political thought and Christian faith. Matthew Rose's book is essential reading on this point.
The second issue is that defining the primary threat to the church as "progressivism" confuses a symptom for the disease. One person who understands this very well is Comer himself. It's not that Comer is unconcerned with progressivism. The quotes above should make his concerns quite obvious.
But for Comer there are deeper problems that are more significant and complicated than progressive political thought. The disease is what he refers to as "ideology," which he defines as a tendency to take partial truths and make them the whole truth or to take a subordinate good and make it ultimate. And this tendency is then accelerated by our technological moment, which makes it easy to shop for ideologies as one would clothes or food, in the way he and Tyson describe in the podcast episode linked above. Comer seeks to overcome those difficulties through, amongst other things, daily Bible reading and strict rules around media consumption and device usage. (In the orthodoxy sermon linked above he explicitly tells people that those are the two core elements of his church's rule of life.)
For Comer, the chief problem of our day is not actually political in nature, such that a sufficiently confrontational, aggressive polemic against progressivism implemented by a sufficiently large army of conservatives will address the problems. The chief problem is primarily spiritual and is downstream of the spiritually enervating world of late secularism that deprives us of what we need to define or experience spiritual health and then tells us to go out and define our own truth and our own best life while giving us a multiplicity of choice but no actual counsel or aid.
This, I think, is both why the rule of life is so vital for Comer and also why he spent an entire book writing against the busyness and rush of contemporary life. Is progressivism a threat to the faith? Comer would certainly say that it is. But then he would want to say "but the iPhone is an even bigger threat." (In this respect, you could almost read Comer as seeking to furnish a sufficient response to the problem flagged several years ago by Jon Askonas in the pages of Compact.)
None of this is to say that the rule of life pietist tradition in American evangelicalism, which is ultimately a tradition downstream of Dallas Willard, Richard Foster, and John Ortberg, is immune to critique. Erik Coonce, Myles Werntz, and Kirsten Sanders have all made good criticisms of the current discourse around a "rule of life."
Indeed, I am now reading both the PCA's Directory for Worship and the Book of Common Prayer and have been struck by the way that both resources offer a historically grounded solution to many of the things that some low-church evangelicals are seeking. If you are a low-church evangelical seeking a sense of spiritual rootedness and security amidst the maelstrom of DIY secularism, simply becoming some sort of confessional Protestant with a defined liturgical tradition guiding public worship might be a very powerful aid, and one that spares you the work of reinventing the wheel, which is one of the questions I have about Comer's project. So there are some ways to critique this, I think.
However, attempts to depict Comer as inoffensive to progressive concerns, as someone whose faith poses no threat to the established order, or as someone on a liberal trajectory himself get him badly wrong. It is true, to be sure, that progressivism is a threat to the American church. It is also true that sometimes the Christian who pulls their punches when dealing with a certain ideology today will be extolling that ideology in five years. Bell himself is a good example of this, in fact.
But to stop at these observations is to leave oneself with a flattened, textureless approach to cultural critique. And that matters because the outcome of such a critique made across many platforms (by people with far less intelligence and care than Challies!) and to many people over a sustained period of time will be that quite a large audience is schooled in a way of reading and criticizing society that is not wrong, but is limited and leaves them vulnerable to other, often equally dangerous, enemies of piety and Christian discipleship.
Indeed, I can't help thinking that if someone like Al Mohler, for example, had a critique of our moment closer to Comer's and less like the culture war approach he operates out of perhaps he would have been more immune to pressure from far right actors. World Opinions, which Mohler runs, recently published a column on immigration by an author who elsewhere has favorably quoted Bronze Age Pervert while claiming that "living space" is the central political problem. Put another way: They had a guy who had just been echoing and agreeing with actual Nazi talking points regarding immigration write about immigration.
Would they be doing such things if they had a more trenchant critique of our moment, perhaps one closer to Comer's? Challies, to his great credit, has never fallen into any of these particular political errors. But the patterns of thought reflected in the review are broadly the same as those of American Calvinistic Baptists who have repeatedly now fallen into these quite serious errors because they lack a social heuristic big enough for the moment.
I once heard a friend of mine describe an author from the young, reformed world as having a hundred answers to a thousand questions. What he meant is that this particular author had existed in such a specific and somewhat contrived intellectual space for so long that he had functionally developed 100 extremely well drilled answers to questions he came across and he never came across any questions that those answers didn't address. But those questions did exist; he simply didn't hear them because of the artificially narrow groups he belonged to.
To shift the image, we might recall Chesterton's account of the mad man in Orthodoxy, which is one of the best passages he ever wrote: The mad man thinks in a perfect and uncontradictable circle. The trouble is the circle is too small. It explains everything, but in a small and unsatisfying way:
Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable mark of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic's theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument.
I do not agree with everything Comer writes or says. But I feel a gratitude toward him because he gave my mind air. He modeled something cleaner and cooler, something beyond the suffocations of one-sided culture war rhetoric. That something, it turned out, was a life of Christian discipleship, bound by love for Jesus and submission to Scripture.