The New Cross Is No Cross At All

From Apprising Ministries:

...You must also ask yourself do you really think that in this generation we are seeing the radically changed lives of Christians that we read about in the New Testament; and we have witnessed down through the ages in Church history? And are we Christians turning the world upside down; or, have we in fact become even more worldly since Tozer’s time?

He put his finger right on the problem in his comments about the so-called “new” pragmatic methods of preaching the Gospel, which were just becoming popular back in his day. For truly this weak-willed compromise of Biblical righteousness within the Church Growth Movement is not really new at all. As through the eyes of a prophet, Tozer could see the Willow Creeks and the Saddlebacks and the Lakewoods coming, and in his inimitable style he said:

The old cross [killed] men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the [old] cross; before that cross it bows and toward that cross it points with carefully staged histrionics – but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear.

I well know how many smooth arguments can be marshaled in support of the new cross. Does not the new cross win converts and make many followers and so carry the advantage of numerical success? Should we not adjust ourselves to the changing times? Have we not heard the slogan ‘New days, new ways?’ And who but someone very old and very conservative would insist upon death as the appointed way to life?

And who today is interested in a gloomy mysticism that would sentence its flesh to a cross and recommend self-effacing humility as a virtue actually to be practiced [even] by modern Christians? These are the arguments, along with many more flippant still, which are brought forward to give an appearance of wisdom to the hollow and meaningless cross of popular Christianity.

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