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FIRST RESPONSE: Father, Son and Holy Rift |
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Written by Editor
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First Response
September 2006
Review: “Father, Son and Holy Rift”
Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2006
By Don Williams
Chuck Smith Sr. and Chuck Smith Jr. are featured in Column One on the front page of The L.A. Times. It seems that the younger Smith has so strayed from his father’s certainties that he has now (under pressure) withdrawn his Calvary Chapel in Dana Point, California, from the movement centered in Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa, the 15,000 member congregation which is the “Vatican” for the almost a thousand Calvary Chapels in the US. As the article unfolds, we see that the certainties of the elder Smith are no longer commanding for his son. What worked for one generation appears to be less viable for the next.
For Chuck Sr., homosexuality is a “perverted lifestyle,” divine wrath comes in earthquakes and 9/11 and Armageddon is imminent. Unlike his son, Smith insists “he has never known a day’s doubt or despair.” But Chuck Jr.’s “voice trembles with vulnerability and grapples with ambiguity. Without a trace of fire and brimstone, he speaks of Christianity as a “conversation rather than a dogma…and aims to reach ‘generations of the post-modern age’ that distrust blind faith and ironclad authority.” Chuck Jr. has been divorced and struggles with depression. His journey has also taken him into embracing Catholic spiritual disciplines. For zealous members of his father’s church, this is too much. An Internet war erupted with a Costa Mesa congregant blogging, “What will it take for Chuck Sr. to stop the nepotism? Does his son have to burn incense to Isis and Zeus before he is disfellowshipped from a Bible-believing fellowship of churches?”
Behind the conflict, the article asserts, is Chuck Jr.’s history. Raised by his mother, he grew up with a mostly emotionally absent father, busy in ministry. (I can personally attest that the Jesus Movement, hugely impacted by Chuck Sr. was a heady and overwhelming time.) Later he reflected about his dad, “To hear him speak, you just get the impression this is such a warm and intimate person, but the closer you got to him, the more you’d realize he really didn’t have those intimacy skills.”
While his peers were watching the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, Chuck Jr. was in church. The Times reports, “When he suffered his first bout of severe depression in his teens, his hearty, ever-upbeat father found the malady so alien he could provide little help. If you’re sad all the time, he told his son, you won’t have many friends.” Although disconnected from his generation in many ways, when Chuck Jr. got to college, since he carries the name of his now famous father, he found himself often defending Christianity. Finally he dropped out of college and planted a couple of Calvary Chapel Churches.
At first, Chuck Sr. and Chuck Jr. were theologically roughly on the same page. The Times reports, “They preached damnation for the unsaved, the wickedness of homosexuality, and what the son, looking back later, would call ‘a general hopelessness about the world,’ one saved only by the promise of the imminent, cataclysmic Second Coming.” In fact, Chuck Sr. preached that Jesus would return in the 1980’s, and many of his followers made personal and financial decisions accordingly. But his son began to drift from his certainties. “He began to consider that when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of heaven, he was referring to the rewards of a selfless life, here and now – that the Gospels’ core message was real-world compassion, not preparation for the afterlife.” Issues like how a loving God could send people to Hell, whether the “lake of fire” is a real place, and a “literal” interpretation of the Book of Revelation dogged him. Chuck Jr. comments, “To use [the Book of Revelation] for prognostication, to me is just ridiculous… I knew a guy who was racking up debt because he just assumed he was going to get raptured and wouldn’t have to pay for it.” Rather than condemning homosexuality, Chuck Jr. began to reach out to gays in Laguna Beach when the AID’s epidemic hit. He concluded that people don’t simply choose to be gay.
The evidence of his conflicts with the Calvary Chapel Movement to the contrary, Chuck Jr. believes that he is really continuing his father’s ministry from the 1960’s. Like his dad then, he is engaged in radical outreach now. The Times reports, “Since its early days as ‘the culturally relevant, rock-n-roll worship, hippie church,’ he believed, Calvary Chapel has regressed into a ‘hunker-down-mentality’ – ride out the vagaries of this evil world until Jesus comes to the rescue.” Chuck Jr. wants to take the gospel back to the streets in his own way.
Although no longer a part of the Calvary system, Chuck Jr. asserts that he is closer to his dad now than ever before. For his part, Chuck Sr. stresses how much he loves his son and regrets not spending more time with him growing up. He comments, “Surely he’s not a clone, and I respect and admire him for that. There’s nothing shoddy about his ministry at all.”
When Chuck Jr. dropped out of Calvary, his dad issued a memo “denouncing the use of icons, Eastern influences, ‘special breathing techniques,’ tolerance for homosexuality and “the soft peddling of hell as the destiny of those who reject the salvation offered through Jesus Christ.” (All blog criticisms of Chuck Jr.) Reminded of this by The Times, Chuck Sr. “replies calmly and amiably, that he and his son are just aiming for different audiences, and he doesn’t want to alienate the one he has. He says their relationship is stronger than ever, even deepened by the controversy. ‘I don’t feel that he’s an apostate at all. If he would begin to question that Jesus is the Son of God, then I would be concerned.’”
What can we learn from this exchange?
1. There is a real generation gap. Chuck Sr. grew up in traditional Fundamentalism/ Dispensationalism and found its themes of the restoration of Israel, the recreation of the Roman Empire, the rapture, the Tribulation and the immediate return of Christ to be evangelistically compelling. His context was the establishment of the Jewish homeland, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the larger Cold War, the sexual revolution, the drug culture and generational dislocation (“Don’t trust anyone over 30.”). These crises offered a way to connect the morning paper with a certain understanding of Biblical prophecy and call a generation to Christ. The key to Chuck’s ministry was not only evangelism but a casual cultural context (especially dressing down and using contemporary music) that related to the Counter Culture. In a wildly uncertain world, Smith gave certainty through dogmatic Biblical preaching and his fatherly smile. But for Chuck Jr. this does not translate well to a post-modern world. Moreover, it is theologically and exegetically questionable if not suspect.
Fundamentalism/Dispensationalism stands within the Enlightenment context (A.D. 1790-1990) of the modern world. It is both a rejection of liberal theology and the embracing of its worldview, its demand for a rational system that ties the whole Bible together. It offers its take on Israel and the Church (two totally separate entities) and our prophetic future knit together from Daniel, Ezekiel, Mark 13 and the Book of Revelation. Rather than living in the End (kingdom theology), it is breathlessly waiting for the End to come. Evil is to be welcomed (especially political-environmental and an apostate church) as signs of Jesus’ soon return. But with the collapse of the Enlightenment world-view, all “systems” are up for grabs. Dispensationalism imposes its complete system on Scripture. Kingdom theology lives in the tension of the kingdom come and coming.
Both Chucks need to be seen and understood in their historical context. This will save us from judging either man unfairly or either ministry harshly.
2. There is a cost to organizational ministry and often the family pays dearly. Chuck Jr. had a largely absent father. Often rejection lies behind depression. It is an oversimplification to say that his bouts with depression and divorce are the result. But he certainly would have had more support from an emotionally present father who would take the time to understand depression and its treatment. Simple exhortations to “get over it” or the warning that you won’t have many friends are not only unhelpful, they are damaging.
3. What is not said in the article is that Chuck Sr. moved from an experiential emphasis on the ministry of the Holy Spirit to the much more restrained emphasis of traditional evangelicalism. This absence of the freedom and operative gifts of the Spirit clearly created a vacuum in his son’s heart and turned him “eastward” to Orthodox spirituality and “westward” to Roman Catholic mysticism. When we surrender the adventure of living in the Spirit and seek to domesticate him, if we don’t pay a price, our children will. Understanding eastern and western spirituality may be helpful to us, but spiritual disciplines must never become a substitute for the dynamic of the Spirit’s power and presence in our communities and our ministries.
In conclusion, we need good, strong theology. In his fundamentalist way, Chuck Sr. offered this to a drifting, confused generation. Evangelists he nurtured, such as Mike Macintosh and Greg Laurie, carry the gospel with urgency and certainty. The fruit speaks for itself. The questions Chuck Jr. asks about homosexually, Biblical interpretation, and the doctrine of hell need to be answered with Biblical fidelity and theological integrity beyond an appeal to a few proof-texts or the exhortation to “simply believe the Bible.” For those of us committed to historic orthodoxy and kingdom ministry, we need also to go deep into kingdom theology. This will subvert the threat of a generation gap in our churches and families and our children drifting from radical Biblical faith.
On a personal note, I thank God for all I have learned from Calvary Chapel and Chuck Smith’s ministry over the years. Important values such as being culturally current were transferred into the Vineyard Churches and the larger renewal movement (such as New Wine in the UK). Even though we find ourselves far from Fundamentalism/Dispensationalism, we are the stronger for Chuck Smith’s pioneering efforts which changed much of the church as we know it.
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First Response 
