We
have thus become pawns of the world we have created, moved about by
the forces of modernity, our inventions themselves displacing their
inventors in an ironic recapitulation of the first dislocation in
which God in which God’s creatures replaced their Creator and
exiled him from his own world.
Image and appearance assume the function that character and morality once had.
We
have ended up with more, but we ourselves have ended up being much
less.
We
have become spiritual vagrants in the modern wasteland, wanderers
with no home to return to. The inner terrain of our lives —
including the soil in which our Christian faith grows — is
constantly shifting.
The
protestant liberalism represented by these churches unabashedly
sought a synthesis between Christian faith and modern culture. The
liberals held that culture was flawed but that it was not estranged
from the life of God. because God is to be found immanently within
all human beings, they said, the meaning a morality by which America
should live is to be found in religious consciousness.
The
more modern they felt themselves compelled to be, the less Christian
they were able to remain. It was a predicament from which they could
find no way to extricated themselves.
Without
God’s truth, without his Word as its center, a civil religion also
forfeits his grace and his judgment — and without these, it has not
means to survive in the modern world.
If
a convergence ha sin fact taken place between modernity and
evangelicalism, it is not because modernity has become more
theological but because evangelicalism has become modern.
Modernity
has be hard at work reducing evangelical faith to something that is
largely private and internal. Belief has shrunk from being a
contemporary confession of Gods Truth in the church and beyond to
being simply a part of personal identity and psychological makeup.
Many evangelicals quietly assume , perhaps even without much thought,
that it would be uncouth and uncivil to push this private dimension
to noticeably or noisely on others or into the public square.……
Modern culture grants me absolute freedom to believe whatever I want
to believe — so long as keep those believes from infringing on the
consciousness or behavior of anyone else, especially on points of
controversy.
The
fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests
to inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is to distant, His
grace too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, his gospel is too
easy, and his Christ is too common.
Why
do people choose the substitute over God himself? Probably the most
important reason is that it obviates accountability to God. We can
meet idols on our own terms because they are our own creations. They
are safe, predictable, and controllable; they are, in Jeremiah’s
colorful language, the “scarecrows in a cucumber field” (10.5).
There
was a time when individualists lived by the internal gyroscope of
character. They thought for themselves, did what they believed to be
right even if they received no approbation from others, judging that
it was better, as David Heisman put it, to be right than to be
president.
We
now blithely speak of marketing the gospel like any other commodity,
oblivious to the fact that such rhetoric betrays a vast intrusion of
worldliness into the church. It was once one of the hallmarks of
evangelicalism that it offered a pronounced cultural critique, but
now it is attentive as any other aspect of that culture to the
pronouncements of the pollster.
It
is true that the self has lost its capacity for connectedness in the
world outside of itself, but it is also the case that it nevertheless
seeks to adapt itself to the multiple shifting worlds of meaning
through which it must pass each day and that this has a powerful
effect on personal identity.…
Personal
identity now is being shaped on the basis of a vision of freedom that
amounts to little more than complete randomness.
Families
have traditionally served as the chief conduit for the transmission
of values from one generation to another, and now this conduit is
breaking down.
modernization
is progressively erasing geographical distinctions as a means of
defining community. The modern individual is almost wholly rootless,
bereft of any psychological connections to place. To be sure, the new
freedom from various parochialism is in some sense exhilarating, but
it does not come without a price
Where
the self wanders the earth as a vagrant, belonging nowhere, something
that is profoundly intrinsic to being human has been lost
Personal
identity became increasingly associated not with the narrative of
one’s inner life but with the projection of one’s public image
.…In this world self is not something that is; it is
something that is constructed.…In the modern world,…we are
required to construct multiple selves because we live in so many
different “worlds,” play so many different audiences, encounter
so many different experiences, and juggle so many different values.
There
is a hunger for religious experience bu an aversion to theological
definition of that experience. There is a hunger for God but a
disenchantment with dogma or doctrine.
When
the consumer is sovereign the product (in this case God himself)must
be subservient.
Neitzche…He
declared that God had died, or more precisely, that he had been
murdered.… He was speaking of the passing of a world in which
meaning and values had been rooted in the transcendent. Hi saw a
world in which human beings were wresting sovereignty for themselves,
and hencea world in which there were no longer ultimate values but
only present possibilities — possibilities that were fluid, open,
and unstructured by the divine or by an absolute moral order.
What
may start out as an additional authority alongside the word of God
will eventually supplant its authority altogether.
In
the marketplace, everything is for us, for our pleasure, for our
satisfaction, and we have come to assume that it must be so in the
church as well, and so we have transformed the God of mercy into a
God who is at our mercy
We
imagine that for those who love God and are called according to his
purpose, all things work together for their satisfaction and the
inner tranquility of their lives.
The
New Testament never promises anyone a life of psychological wholeness
or offers a guarantee of the consumers satisfaction with Christ. To
the contrary, it offers the prospect of indignities, loss, damage,
disease, and pain. The faithfully Scripture were scorned, beaten,
imprisoned, shipwrecked, and executed.
[In
dealing with the worship of the “virgin” Mary] It was assumed
that when Mary approached Christ, her Son, she could expect a far
more gracious reception than common sinners, and Christ, in turn,
could approach the yet more distant father on their behalf.
The
people of Our Time are strongly inclined to trace all internal
confusion, pain, disappointment or lost advantage back to someone
else’s door.
Our
experience of the modern world produces the sense that there is no
sure and steady purpose pervading life, that purpose, like life
itself, has broken apart into small, unrelated fragments, that our
daily routine is severed from the meaning that God once provide to
it.
There
is no way, he said, that we can extrapolate from the world’s pain
and disorder, or even from what is good in the world, to what the
designs of God might be. We cannot have any hope of success if we
begin below… Those who begin with the human perspective inevitably
end with the human perspective. We must begin with God, for
only in this way will we end with the divine perspective.
Modernity
has gone a long way toward robbing us of our faith convictions. While
we may believe in God’s existence and his goodness, we find
ourselves psychologically disabled in our attempts to bring this
belief into incisive relation with the stuff of daily experience,
unable to frame effectively our daily routine within the context of
ultimatum.
There
is some artificiality involved in slicing the work of God too finely,
for his purposes were conceived in eternity and are worked out in
history as an interconnected whole. What God did in bringing the
world into being cannot be separated from his ongoing work of
sustaining it, nor can his purposes in creating human life be
separated from his purposes of redemption and judgement(John 17.24:
1Peter1:17-20). The beginning must be read in the light of the end,
because the end was present in the mind of God in the beginning and
hence all that comes to pass has been in the mind of God from the
beginning(Isaiah 14.24,27; 22.11; 40.10)
Efforts
to build character have been replaced by efforts to manage the
impression we make on others. behind this constant game of charades,
this shifting of cultural guises, is a personality that is typically
shallow, self-absorbed, elusive, leery of commitments, unattached to
people or place, dedicated to keeping all options open, and
frequently incapable of either loyalty or gratitude.… On the other
hand, this kind of person often proves unwilling to accept the
limitations of life and hence is inclined to believe in what is
deeply irrational. Thus primitive myths and superstitions are now
making their appearance side by side with computer wizardry and
rampant secularization.
in
the post-literate and post-rational world we are entering, the truth
of Christian faith may no longer travel on the wings of logical
argument as it has in the past, but it will be compelling nonetheless
as churches reform their inner lives to embody a fitting counter
cultural spirituality centered in a serious, worshipful recognition
of the presence of God, an obedient submission to his Word, and a
compassionate outworking of His grace in loving service of the
stricken of this world.
God
in the Wasteland: The Reality of Truth in A World of Fading Dreams
Wm.
B Eerdmans Publishing Co. Grand Rapids , USA and Intervarsity Press,
Leicester, UK
