1. See www.theonion.com/articles/unambitious-loser-with-happy-fulfilling-life-still,33233/ (accessed 7/30/2013).
2. Heather Havrilesky, “All Hail Lord Business!” The New York Times Magazine (March 2, 2014), 46 – 47.
3. Tish Harrison Warren, “Courage in the Ordinary,” written Wednesday, April 3, 2013, at http://thewell.intervarsity.org/blog/courage-ordinary (accessed February 26, 2014).
4. Rod Dreher, “Everydayness,” Nov. 14, 2012 at www.theam-ericanconservative.com/dreher/everydayness-wallace-stevens/ (accessed July 7, 2013).
5. www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2007/march/7.53.html (accessed December 1, 2013).
6. My colleague, Pastor Kim Riddlebarger, has written a series of insightful reflections on Orange County’s series of Christian empires at http://kimriddlebarger.squarespace.com/the-latest-post/2013/12/18/the-changing-religious-climate-of-orangecounty-revisited-an.html (accessed November 2, 2013).
7. Jim Hinch, “Where Are the People,” The American Scholar, at http://theamericanscholar.org/where-are-the-people/#.UrSVQ2yA1dg (accessed December 1, 2013).
8. Tish Harrison Warren, “Courage in the Ordinary.” The author’s insights may also be heard in an interview I conducted with her at www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2013/09/01/whi–1169-courage-in-the-ordinary/.
9. Collin Hansen, Young, Restless and Reformed: A Journalist’s Journey with the New Calvinists (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008).
10. See James K. A. Smith, Letters to a Young Calvinist: An Invitation to the Reformed Tradition (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2010).
11. Thomas J. Peters and Nancy K. Austin, A Passion for Excellence: The Leadership Difference (New York: Warner, 1985), xvii.
12. Quoted in Gustav Wingren, Luther on Vocation (trans. Carl C. Rasmussen; Evansville, IN: Ballast, 1994), 10.
13. Herman Selderhuis, Calvin’s Theology of the Psalms, 235.
14. The Heidelberg Catechism, Q & A 1, from the Christian Reformed Church translation: www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/heidelberg-catechism.
15. Ibid., Q & A 114.
16. Ibid., Q & A 115.
17. See www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2012/june/when-are-we-going-to-grow-up.html.
18. Ibid. See also Thomas E. Bergler, The Juvenilization of American Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
19. Joe Queenan, Balsamic Dreams: A Short but Self-Important History of the Baby Boomer Generation (New York: Henry Hold, 2001), 23.
20. Ibid., 24.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist §2.
22. C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory (new ed.; New York: HarperOne, 2009), 26.
23. “William Bennett Quotes.” http://thinkexist.com/quotes/William–Bennett/ (accessed March 18, 2014).
24. David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
25. (New York: Atria, 2007).
26. Dr. Keith Ablow, “We Are Raising a Generation of Deluded Narcissists” (FoxNews.com, January 8, 2013). See also the White Horse Inn interview with Jean Twenge at www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/2012/06/24/whi-1107-the-narcissism-epidemic/.
27. John Culkin, “A Schoolman’s Guide to Marshal McLughan,” Saturday Review, March 18, 1967.
28. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: How the Internet Is Changing Our Brains (New York: Norton, 2011).
29. (New York: Basic Books, 2011).
30. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, A Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Business, 2004).
31. C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1945), chap 25.
32. Ibid., 118.
33. G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News (March 19, 1924).
34. Abraham Kuyper, Principles of Sacred Theology (trans. J. Vriend; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1980), 574 – 75.
35. Quoted from Miroslav Volf, After Our Likeness (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993), 161 – 62.
36. Ian Murray, Revival and Revivalism: The Making and Marring of American Evangelicalism, 1750 – 1850 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1994). I find his distinction between revival and revivalism persuasive and helpful. Nevertheless, the open question is whether emphasizing the former has not also undermined the ordinary ministry.
37. Ironically, Finney held to an ex opere operato view of his own new measures that he would never allow to baptism and the Supper. As for the Pelagian charge, Finney’s Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Bethany, 1976) explicitly denies original sin and insists that the power of regeneration lies in the sinner’s own hands, rejects any substitutionary notion of Christ’s atonement in favor of the moral influence and moral government theories, and regards the doctrine of justification by an alien righteousness as “impossible and absurd.” In fact, Roger Olson, in his defense of Arminianism, sees Finney’s theology as well beyond the Arminian pale (Arminian Theology [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006], 27). Thus, it is all the more remarkable that Finney occupies such a distinguished place among evangelicals, as the tribute to him in the Billy Graham Center (at Wheaton, Illinois) illustrates. It is little wonder that American religion struck Bonhoeffer as “Protestantism without the Reformation.”.
38. Charles G. Finney, Revivals of Religion (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, n.d.), 321.
39. Quoted in Michael Pasquarello III, Christian Preaching: A Trinitarian Theology of Proclamation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), 24.
40. Charles Finney, Lectures on Revival (2nd ed.; New York: Leavitt, Lord, 1835), 184 – 204. “Law, rewards, and punishments — these things and such as these are the very heart and soul of moral suasion. . . . My brethren, if ecclesiastical bodies, colleges, and seminaries will only go forward — who will not bid them God speed? But if they will not go forward — if we hear nothing from them but complaint, denunciation, and rebuke in respect to almost every branch of reform, what can be done?”
41. John Williamson Nevin, The Anxious Bench (London: Taylor & Francis, 1987), 2 – 5.
42. See Keith J. Hardman, Charles Grandison Finney: Revivalist and Reformer (Grand Rapids, Baker, 1990), 380 – 94.
43. See, e.g., Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District: The Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800 – 1850 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982).
44. Garry Wills, Head and Heart: American Christianities (New York: Penguin, 2007), 294.
45. Ibid., 302.
46. See the previous chapter, p. 54.
47. Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature & Grace (trans. Brother Richard Arnandez; San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984), 56 – 58.
48. Dave Harvey, Rescuing Ambition (Wheaton. IL: Crossway, 2010), 14 – 15. Harvey makes a great case for rescuing ambition and I don’t disagree at all in substance. Yet I still think it’s worth following its transformation from vice to virtue and suggest that instead of rescuing it, we should replace it with words like “drive” or “passion.”
49. Metamorphoses Book 8, ll. 78 – 94; see http://readytogoe-books.com/classics/Ovid-icarus.htm.
50. William Casey King, Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
51. Ibid., 101.
52. John Donne, “Anatomy of the World,” see http://www.poet-ryfoundation.org/poem/173348.
53. Quoted in King, Ambition, 82.
54. Ibid., 91.
55. This hymn was written in 1848. See www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/a/l/allthing.htm.
56. King, Ambition, 94 – 118.
57. Ibid., 93.
58. www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2013/04/millennials-vs-earlier-generations-a-scorecard/275049/.
59. Friedrich Nietzche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche (trans. Walter Kaufmann; New York: Penguin, 1976), 502.
60. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (ed. Walter Kaufmann; trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale; New York: Random House, 1967), 101.
61. A. W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place of God (Camp Hill, PA: Wingspread, 2008), 16 – 17.
62. For a provocative analysis of this point, see James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009).
63. Note in a similar vein, in Matt 7:22, those on the outside point to all of the mighty works they supposedly did in Jesus’ name: prophesying, casting out demons, and performing mighty works.
64. Jerome, “Letter CXLVI (To Evangelus),” in Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (ed. Phillip Schaff; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 288 – 89; Ambrose, Commentary on Ephesians 4.2, cited in Samuel Miller, “Presbyterianism: The Apostolic Constitution,” in Paradigms in Polity (ed. David W. Hall and Joseph H. Hall; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 57 – 58.
65. Over several pages Jerome cites examples from Acts and the Epistles to demonstrate that presbyter and bishop were one and the same office, “but gradually, as the seed beds of dissensions were eradicated, all solicitude was conferred on one man . . . more by custom than by the truth of the Lord’s arrangement.” St. Jerome’s Commentaries on Galatians, Titus, and Philemon (trans. Thomas P. Scheck; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010), 288 – 90.
66. Gregory I, Letters in Leo the Great, Gregory the Great. In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 12, second series (trans. Henry Wace, ed. Philip Schaff; various publishers), i.75 – 76; ii.170, 171, 179, 166, 169, 222, 225.
67. Second Helvetic Confession, ch. 1.
68. Geoff Surratt, Greg Ligon, and Warren Bird, The Multi-Site Church Revolution: Being One Church in Many Locations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 18.
69. See footnote 65.
70. Surratt, Ligon, and Bird, The Multi-Site Church Revolution, 18..
71. From Martin Luther’s hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”.
72. Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 3.
73. Ibid., 12.
74. Adam Smith, An Inquiry in to Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith; ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner; Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 2:456.
75. Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, 49.
76. Ibid., 50.
77. Ibid., 12.
78. Ibid., 67.
79. Ibid., 70.
80. Ibid., 67.
81. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. McNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2.2.15.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid., 4.20.8, 14.
84. Luther, “Sermon on the Commemoration of Bridget of Sweden,” quoted in H. D. M. Spence and Joseph S. Excell, eds., The Pulpit Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1950), 20:323.
85. See James D. Hunter, To Change the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
86. www.challies.com/music-movies/another-switchfoot-concert (retrieved December 16, 2013).
87. George Eliot, Middlemarch (London: Penguin, 1994), 838.
88. J. I. Packer and Gary A. Parrett, Grounded in the Gospel: Building Believers the Old-Fashioned Way (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 96.
89. Carl Trueman, “On Pastoral Succession,” at www.reformation21.org/blog/2011/06/on-pastoral-succession.php (accessed March 18, 2014).
90. Kasser, The High Price of Materialism, 91.
91. Larry Alex Taunton, “Listening to Youth Atheists: Lessons for a Stronger Christianity,” The Atlantic (June 6, 2013), available at www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/06/listening-to-young-atheists-lessons-for-a-stronger-christianity/276584/ (accessed March 10, 2014).
92. Ivy Beckwith, Formational Children’s Ministry: Shaping Children Using Story, Ritual, and Relationship (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2010), 98.
93. Kenda Creasy Dean, Almost Christian: What the Faith of Our Teenagers Is Telling the American Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3.
94. Kate Murphy, “Is Youth Ministry Killing the Church?” at www.christiancentury.org/blogs/archive/2010 – 02/youth-ministry-killing-church (accessed March 10, 2014).
95. See Packer and Parrett, Grounded in the Gospel.
96. See Brian Cosby, Giving Up Gimmicks: Recovering Youth Ministry from an Entertainment Culture (Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2012).
97. www.whitehorseinn.org/blog/page/2/#sthash.k4HPTftD.dpuf.
98. John Calvin, Institutes, 1.2.2.
99. Ibid., 3.3.19.
100. Ibid., 4.20.1 – 3.
101. Gustav Wingren, Luther on Vocation (trans. Carl C. Rasmussen; Evansville, IN: Ballast, 1994; reprinted from Augsburg-Fortress edition), 2.
102. Ibid., 10.
103. Ibid., 13, 31.
104. Ibid., 42.
105. Ibid., 43.
106. Rod Dreher, The Little Way of Ruth Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life (New York: Grand Central, 2013), 209.
107. Ibid., 216.
108. Ibid., 267.
109. See the excellent treatment by Gene Edward Veith, God At Work: Finding Your Christian Vocation in All of Life (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2002).