Welcome back, TheoBros. Let’s talk “Non-Conformity.”
Blessed Puritanism
What made the Puritans of the 1600s genuinely Puritan? It wasn’t their rigid rules and dark, plainclothes — sunken eyes and judgmental faces. It wasn’t the witch-burnings, ruler-slapping, and monk-like rejection of society. These are common caricatures, but they’re far from the truth. We know the Puritans as joyful, vibrant, theological giants through many of their works—their writings are very much worth reading.
Their lives are worth emulating too. According to John Mckelvey, John Geree (c. 1601-1649), a Puritan, endured persecution under the kings James I and Charles I for nonconformity to the church of England.
In The Character of an Old English Puritan, Geree defines a Puritan as one who saw the Word of God as their ultimate authority in all of faith and practice, individually and corporately.
At heart, the Puritans were reformers of the church, and reformers, by nature, were non-conformists. They bucked trends. They jumped the bandwagon. They swam upstream. They went against the grain. When they had to choose between the Word of God and the word of man, they defiantly (and joyfully) chose the Word of God.
The Obvious and the Subtle
Two delusional and consequential approaches to the world plague Evangelicals: 1) They are delusional: believing they advance the Christian cause is utter foolishness. 2) They are consequential: they harm the Christian cause. One is obvious, and one is subtle. One is simply conformity; the other is a “shallow” non-conformity.
Examples of the obvious abound, and we’ll deal with them here. Some professing Christians approach the world with incredible naivete, ignoring critical doctrines like the total depravity of man and the necessity of regeneration. The strategy is simple but jaw-dropping: to win the world to Christ, we must give up some ground. We’ll scratch their backs, and they’ll scratch ours. We’ll compromise.
Obvious Conformity looks an awful lot like an article posted at Relevant Magazine (an Evangelical, albeit Woke, website) on September 6th called, “Why We Should Listen to Non-Christians.”
“The Church should listen to non-Christians to understand how we can be a light to the world,” author Ben White claims.
Never mind the fact that “all things that pertain to life and godliness” are found in Christ Jesus (2 Peter 1:3), and “all Scripture…is useful for training in righteousness” (2 Timothy 3:16). The Word of God is sufficient to teach us how to be a light to the world.
According to Ephesians 2, the world is spiritually dead and at enmity with God—so perhaps the world isn’t exactly equipped to teach us how to be the witnesses God calls us to be?
After criticizing Pastor John MacArthur for opening his church in 2020, White goes on to say, “We have to pay more attention to the world and more often be its loving advocate rather than its sworn enemy.”
If Satan wrote a blog post, he would criticize MacArthur for opening his church, mock faithful believers, and close it with “Pay more attention to the world and be an advocate for it.”
Ben’s stance is a pure compromise, total defection, a dereliction of duty, and the definition of conformity to the world. Unfortunately, examples like this abound because it’s the easy way out of persecution—but it’s not the way of Christ or the Puritans.
Churches also face a much more subtle problem when it comes to the conformity-non-conformity issue.
Shallow Non-Conformity
R.C. Sproul helpfully explains false, unbiblical, “shallow non-conformity” in his series “Pleasing God,”
What tends to happen among Christians is they say, 'Well, we're going to show the world that we're different. And what we are going to do is we're going to show how different we are from the world by refusing to participate in the world's worldliness.' This means, 'we won't dance, and we won't wear makeup, and we won't go to movies, and we won't play cards.' I remember my first job teaching at a Christian college. I was hired to teach the Bible, and before the school opened, they had a picnic on the beach. Some students pulled out a deck of cards and started playing Bridge. And the dean came over and confiscated the cards. And that was my initiation to discover, to my horror, that the only card game that this group of Christians was allowed to play was Rook, the Christian card game. I said, "Rook!" I said, "Rook! I quit playing Rook when I was eight." I said, "What are they going to do when they find out that their Bible professor plays in duplicate Bridge tournaments?"
It never occurred to me that there's anything spiritual or unspiritual about contract Bridge. Imagine it. Incredibly, that kind of thing emerges in a subculture. But what happens is we look around and see things that people in the secular world do, and we want to make sure that we don't appear in any way like secular people. So we set up these artificial forms of non-conformity. Ladies and gentlemen, the kingdom of God has nothing to do with Rook. Those are superficial types of nonconformity.
Shallow non-conformists say, “Christians shouldn’t color their hair dark brown,” or “Real churches have pews, not chairs.”
These certainly aren’t trendy beliefs, that’s true, but this isn’t this type of non-conformity God is looking for. None of these values are found in Scripture—they’re artificial rules and regulations that merely give an appearance of godliness.
Holding these counter-cultural beliefs isn’t “holding fast the Word of Life” or being a light to the world either. It’s projecting an entirely different religion altogether.
Blessed Non-Conformity
Christians are called to non-conformity, but not the shallow kind. Biblical non-conformity begins with our affections and moves to our actions. Our love for Christ and His finished work at the cross directs us to walk in step with Him, which, naturally, is out of step with the world.
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of you mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. —Romans 12:2
“Be conformed” is from a Greek word that refers to outwardly expressing something that doesn’t reflect what is within. This is a word used for putting on an act. Masquerading. Putting on a show. Playing a part in a drama.
Here, Paul’s command to Rome is that they are not to allow themselves to be conformed to this world. John MacArthur puts it this way: “Don’t let the world around you squeeze you into its mold.”
A Christian shouldn’t masquerade, act like, or play the part of a worldly person. That’s not who we are—we are new creations! To pretend to be anything else is lying.
Unfortunately, this is precisely where many Evangelicals find themselves—the compromising kind of Evangelicals—including our friend from Relevant Magazine.
Light is true light only when it exposes the darkness, not when it looks like the darkness. If light looks like darkness, then it ceases to be light.
This is an unbiblical, foolish, and, frankly, disingenuous strategy for reaching the lost.
R.C. Sproul finishes his thought,
If you want to be a nonconformist, in the biblical sense, be somebody who's word can be trusted; be somebody who will do what's right even if it costs them money. That's different. It's not that if everybody in the world is wearing white hats, we start to wear red ones. That's not the nonconformity that the New Testament is talking about.
If you want to be a true non-conformist, don’t compromise with God-haters or start a Political Revolution. Instead, love Christ deeply, study the Bible diligently, preach the Gospel, die, and be forgotten. Like the Puritans, be radically Biblical, even in the face of danger.