We Need a Banner Spirituality More Than Ever

The Banner of Truth started in 1955 in Oxford with the intention to bring a needed emphasis to bear upon Christian believers in Great Britain. The sixtieth Psalm gave the slogan from the fourth verse:

Thou hast given a banner to them that fear thee, that it may be displayed because of the truth.

A militaristic image of an army’s battle flag unfurled could be construed as a call for Christian militancy, taking the levers of power. But when Sidney Norton and Iain Murray used Psalm 60:4 to express their burden, the intention was to placard the righteousness of Jesus Christ and his saving grace in the gospel.

To unfurl the banner of truth was a testimonial task, full of conviction and faith. This conviction expressed an emphasis within Protestantism that prioritized deep godliness and piety as the proper fruit of truth unfurled.

The Puritans and their successors were the examples that Murray looked to at the encouragement of Martyn Lloyd-Jones. Piety was not a weakness. And it wasn’t pietism either.  The piety which these men saw in the witness of the Puritans was both holy and worldly.

HOLY PIETY

It was holy in the sense that these men thought deeply about God. In so doing, they trembled with fear of God. They considered the ways in which he described himself and distinguished himself. They were particular and precise regarding the truth. They cared about being careful with the truth because they feared God. He was not to be trifled with.

WORLDY PIETY

These were men engaged with the world. They did not retreat. Owen served in Parliament and was a chaplain in the army. Cromwell showed great piety in the early years of his public work. The Westminster divines or the Baptists like William Kiffen were involved in politics and social twists and turns. These were not monks, separating themselves from hard decisions and challenging contexts. They were godly men in the world, aware of the world, but seeking God so as not to be soiled by the world.

These men had both a sense of holy living, but also contemporary engagement. Both emphases are needed today.

Banner Spirituality For Evangelical Fracture

So these Puritan men had the spirituality of the Banner if it is even fair to call it that. But as labels are helpful for organizing our scattered thoughts, a label such as “Banner spirituality” may be useful for us now.

You see that there is a fracturing of Evangelicalism that is happening, so we are told. Is it fracturing along six lines? Is it breaking between evangelicals and fundamentalists? The late Tim Keller and Russell Moore argue for a break with fundamentalists to form a complementarian/egalitarian union (which I think is a horrible capitulation).

Meanwhile, there are battles between Presbyterians and Reformed groups that are refighting the Christ and culture debates that marked Dutch church life, as well as early American Presbyterianism. Baptists are struggling to draw lines and remove the now-old seeker-sensitive Baptists like Rick Warren while watching other Baptists embrace paedobaptist presuppositions or even Roman Catholic Integralist ones. A new local church plant is named, Knox Baptist, I’m told. Some serious historical theology education is needed I think.

Many people are exhausted by fighting to stay holy and separate from the world, so they have chosen to distance themselves from the embarrassment of living “outside the camp” and are rejoining the fold (I see the Moore trajectory this way). These are the people desperately looking for accommodation to LGBTQ+, wokeism, and various Democrat/Labour, Liberal, and Global Left movements. Evangelicals trending this way were broken in mind by Trump or Brexit, and they are ashamed to be associated with others who would support MAGA and its co-belligerents. Some within this group are so exhausted that they come to a point of realism. They are not Christians in any true or historical sense. They are simply ex-angelicals.

On the further side are the ones who know what time it is. They see the problems in front of them with prescience and clarity. They call it as they see it. They point out how governments manipulate us at the behest of enticements from Davos Man. They call out the old-fashioned money laundering and corruption at the highest levels. They see the compromise of the exhausted evangelicals who are one step from exiting the faith. And they are aggressively calling for action in a day when the spirit of the age has choked everyone’s throat.

But there is an even greater need than the prescience of the strong right. They need a Banner spirituality. I say this because one of the features that crop up in the strong right is a pragmatism about the truth. They are right in broad strokes. But they can be fast and loose with the truth, with confession of sin, with precise arguments in the battles being fought. If the good ends justify the means, then truth can be bent, sidelined, or skipped over in the pursuit of the grand truth and its valiant cause.

To skip over truth (and it’s easy to do in the humming speed of our communication), appeals to the man who wants to win the war, but not do the work. The grand cause can justify all kinds of ungodly, unchristian behavior. And when someone points out the ungodliness, the valorous can say that the accuser is a traitor to the cause, a weakling, and a [pejorative].  

But most of these men are not godly. They don’t have the banner of truth unfurled. They have a banner and they are in the fight and they can fight for true things, but the Truth himself is not the banner they fly first and highest.

A Banner spirituality addresses the right and left (such poor categories) and the mushy middle. It is not a Via Media. The Left is confronted with its compromise. It is using the words of Truth to hide its intentions of siding with the world, with the mainstream. Think about it. The sodomy agenda is mainstream. So the idea that a church would refuse to let a woman be the pastor appears so medieval and alien. To be a complementarian in truth is to be a dangerous cultist in this society. Yet a Banner spirituality will speak that truth come what may. A Banner spirituality will not compromise just so they can be on the right wing of the Sodomy Party.

Banner spirituality is too hot to let go-along-to-get-along centrists float with every wind and wave of doctrine (Eph 4:14). The cause of truth and the fear of God that makes clarity and precision a reverential (and even terrifying) concern cannot let a centrist coast. If there is no active testimonial for the truth, then the coasters will be swept away with the social revolution’s tsunami.

Banner spirituality will correct the keen observers on the right by helping them see more and better. They already have keen insights. But their trouble is that they tend to walk by sight, rather than by faith (cf. 2 Cor 5:7). In other words, their insight is predominantly concerned with this life and less about the life to come. If they talk of heaven, it would be to make heaven on earth in this life. They (rightly) protest an underrealized eschatology by (wrongly) presuming an over-realized one. The result is that the grandeur of God and the priorities of his kingdom get marshaled into service of a contemporary program or strategy. God is reduced to a totem of temporal power, the way the Israelites could carry the ark like a lucky charm. Church history indicates that when this happens the next generation of churches turn apostate. I don’t hear anyone on the so-called “right” of fractured evangelicalism pointing out this threat.

It’s Not Too Late

Surely, God’s judgment is on the land if, after nearly seven decades of publishing spiritual gold, the Banner spirituality is discarded, disregarded, or despised.

But it is not too late.

We can thank God for the attentive men who can see the problems at hand. But we must not stop there. We must seek to know, not merely the times, but the God who owns the times (2 Pet 3:8; Rev 1:8). That pursuit is the calling of a Banner spirituality.

TO READ

Re-engage with the many Banner classics that they have reprinted. From the Puritan Paperback series to the many biographies of saints from Whitefield to Lloyd-Jones, there are “good books” to be gleaned from and enjoyed.

A Banner spirituality encompasses other publishers too such as Reformation Heritage books. You can start with Meet the Puritans, or dive into one of their Puritan Treasures set.

Or you can always start with JI Packer’s book, A Quest for Godliness (Crossway), or Leland Ryken’s Worldly Saints (Zondervan). All of these express a “Banner spirituality”.

Last, an even simpler way to start is by using the classic devotional, Valley of Vision. You can get a sample here.

ACTIONS 🥅

1. Assess your media diet. Are you consuming the richest sources of piety in the history of the Christian church? Or are you filling yourself up on the dopamine drip of outrage over people who disagree with you?

2. Read the Puritans. Re-read the pious works. Read them to imbibe them. Ask yourself if you are as prayerful and careful as they were.