The apostle Paul gave King David the highest tribute when he described him as a man after God’s own heart and as one who “served the purpose of God in his own generation” (Acts 13:22, 36). Can we, as followers of Jesus, rise to such a challenge today in one of the most momentous generations in history?
We live in “a civilizational moment,” a period when a civilization loses touch with the foundation and inspiration on which it was built. We therefore face three basic options: renewal of the inspiration, replacement of the inspiration by another, or disintegration and decline. Do we need to remind ourselves that all the great civilizations of the past are to be found in ruins, in museums, or in history books?
Western civilization, the most influential in history, owes much to the Greeks and the Romans; however, it is primarily the fruit of the Christian gospel and Scriptures, which converted the European barbarians from the fourth to the tenth century. In many ways, the Reformation era, often regarded as a pivotal moment in shaping the modern world, represents the high point of this influence. But the role of Christians and the Christian faith has steadily receded since the seventeenth century, due (it is said) to three main reasons: divisions within the church, secularism, and secularization.
Gripped by the Secular
Many Christians confuse secularism and secularization. Secularism is a philosophy maintaining that there is no God (or gods) or any supernatural reality. As Bertrand Russell put it simply, “What science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.” There is no reality beyond the world of the five senses.
Secularization, in contrast, is a process by which more and more of the forces of the modern world (such as science, technology, and market economics) become independent and are no longer understood or dealt with under the framework of faith. Faith, as a result, has been made more marginal and less meaningful — “privately engaging, publicly irrelevant.”
The combination of secularism and secularization has been devastating for the Christian faith. In the traditional world of times past, whether Christian or pagan, what was unseen was not unreal. Indeed, the unseen was more real than the seen, and the seen was understood in light of the unseen. But the two trends together have created what Peter Berger calls “a world without windows.” What is unseen is now unreal. Secularism and secularization have tried to shear off the entire supernatural reality of the Bible and therefore to cut off the church from the inherent power of the word and the Spirit, leaving many Christians in an endless search for renewed relevance through one accommodation to the world after another.
The merging of secularism and secularization appeared to vindicate the triumph of Enlightenment secularism as the replacement for the Christian faith in Western civilization. “Man had come of age,” reason had replaced revelation, progress could replace God, and humanity could achieve heaven on earth. Voices such as Stephen Pinker and Yuval Harari represent this secularist confidence today.
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) seemed to be the nail in the coffin of Christian influence on the West. But the “Second Thirty Years’ War” (1914–1945) exposed the inadequacy of Enlightenment secularism as the replacement faith for the West. And the looming alternative to Christian faith and to Enlightenment secularism is now clearer than ever: a world of ideologies, authoritarianism, and power without principle — whether “hard totalitarianism,” as represented by China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, or “soft totalitarianism,” as represented by the managerial revolution and the encroaching state within the West.
Return from Exile
One key question for Christians today is, Can there be a renewal of faith under the conditions of modernity — not, it must be said, for the sake of the West but for the sake of the integrity and faithfulness of the faith itself?
Most Christians would answer in the affirmative, but we dare not respond too quickly or too lightly, as it now appears that the future of humanity depends on the answer. What is clear — and, once again, contrast is the mother of clarity — is that there can be no renewal from within secularism. Where fate dogged the ancient world, determinism dogs the prospects of the secular modern world. We are not free. We are determined. There is no way out from Decline and Fall. When science has finished reckoning all the factors that influence us, we can never do otherwise than what we have done and will do.
In the Scriptures, by contrast, there is freedom in repentance, even in an extreme crisis such as that of the prodigal son in the pigsty in a far country. That is why the ironclad secular pairing of Decline and Fall can be replaced by the biblical pairing of Exile and Return. As Moses promised at the end of his life, when the people of God return to the Lord, he will return to them and restore their fortunes (Deuteronomy 30:1–3). We need only to think of the First and Second Great Awakenings — their spiritual and theological power and their social and cultural transformations — to appreciate the significance of this promise.
As Lord Acton and Christopher Dawson both underscore, “Religion is the key to history.” Civilizations are about far more than geography, climate, and military power. Along with these other factors, civilizations ultimately rise or fall on the adequacy of their answers to the fundamental questions of human existence — and thus they rise or fall on religion, on faith. Civilizations rise through a creative minority, and they endure or fall according to whether that creative minority remains powerful. The final question in a civilizational moment is whether there are sufficient people with ultimate loyalty to what they see as ultimate reality — or not.
How Then to Live
How does this challenge find us today? Many of the post-1970s forms of Christian accommodation to the world will not do. Much of the church-growth movement, for example, owes more to case studies from Harvard Business School than to the power of God’s word and Spirit. Resorting to politics also will not do. Politics is important for citizenship, but the first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing. Thus, the politicization of the church is the wrong response to the loss of cultural influence.
Reliance on “cultural Christianity” is no better. The new appreciation that faith is indispensable to culture, as well as the number of eminent thinkers who have recently come to faith through this insight, is warmly welcomed. But cultural Christianity is not true faith. It is a useful way station on the road to faith but not the destination itself. The kingdom of God is most powerful and culturally transforming when it is believed to be true rather than useful.
Our challenge at this crucial generation is to read God’s word and welcome God’s Spirit, asking that our hearts, minds, and spirits be opened to the full transcendent reality of the Lord of the Burning Bush, the Lord of the Smoking Mountain, the Lord of the decisive call to pick up our crosses and follow him. Modernity is perhaps the greatest challenge the church has ever faced; only a faith enlarged and empowered by the full truth of God can hope to prevail.
Like Elisha’s myopic servant, we need to have our Western windowless world blasted open, our secular modern shortsightedness surgically corrected, so that we can see the “horses and chariots of fire all around” (2 Kings 6:17). Only then can we put on the whole armor of God and join the struggle not “against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12).
It is time to face up to secularism. It is time to weigh the full devastation of secularization. Let us confess our spiritual, intellectual, and cultural poverty in light of such challenges, just as we put our trust in the God who is greater than all and can be trusted in all situations. In a word, we must have faith in God. We need have no fear. It is time to rise to meet our time as our time meets us, and so to serve God’s purposes in our own extraordinary generation.
