A 21st-Century Power
Photo by Murat Onder on Unsplash
In Luke chapter 9, Jesus deputizes his disciples to go and minister as representatives of God’s Kingdom, giving them “power and authority over all demons and to cure diseases” (Luke 9:1). Note the distinction. Demons were to be cast out; diseases were to be healed. The former was spiritual, the latter was physiological.
This contrast matters in our present technocratic age. In an interview prior to his death, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks described how modern technology had come to replace functions traditionally delivered from within the religious realm.
Look at where we are right now in the evolution of human civilization. To explain the world today, we don’t need revelation, we have science. To control it, we don’t need oracles and magic, we have technology. To control power we don’t need the prophets, we have elections (even if sometimes they go the wrong way). If we are ill, we don’t go to a priest, we go to a doctor. If we are depressed, we don’t need the book of Psalms, we can take a pill. And if we are in search of salvation, we can go to the modern cathedrals of the consumer age, namely shopping centers. So, in functional terms, everything religion used to do is now done by something else.
There was a spiritual and a physical dimension to the power authorized to Jesus’ disciples. But today, as Sacks explains, our modern advances pose a substitutionary threat to spaces previously occupied by religious authority.
To be clear, I’m a recipient and a user of these advances, particularly in the realm of technology. When I have a headache, I take a pill. If I’m lost, I use Google Maps. To help my restless leg syndrome, I go to a sleep doctor. Amazon algorithms tell me what books I might like. Zoom allowed me to maintain job continuity as well as stay connected to loved ones during the pandemic. The list goes on.
So, in lieu of generically lamenting various modern conveniences at our disposal, it is helpful to turn our attention to a related consideration. What are the limits of progress? Specifically, what in an advanced modern society is potent and powerful enough to address our spiritual need? What is sufficient to occupy and satiate what Pascal has described as the “God-shaped hole” in our lives?
Here is the point. Technological conveniences afford us a variety of benefits, but they cannot fill a God-shaped hole. Nor can they inculcate capacities and impulses characteristic of the holy life. The modern forms of power that we frequently consult and consume—aspirin, Google maps, Amazon, medical experts, etc.—they can do a lot for me and in me. But forgiving my enemies? Saying “no” to destructive inclinations? Emptying myself? Possessing an other-oriented disposition? Exhibiting joy and endurance in the face of pain and hardship? Compelling service? Willing the good of another (Aquinas’ definition of love)?
This is a different power whose origins do not arise from technocratic guidance, exponential technological expansion, or entrepreneurial innovation. There is no app for forgiveness. There is no pill for peacebuilding. No consultation is sufficient to re-route the inward curvature of the heart. This requires a different power originating from something else. Someone else.
In our present moment, this is perhaps the most profound, visible, and compelling manner by which to exhibit God’s power in our lives today. There is undoubtedly a power in modern technology, yet there is a space where Christ followers can exhibit a power unattributable to our modern conveniences. Simply put, this is an abundant, holy life. Moral progress constitutes a 21st -century power.
Below I offer rationale why a 21st-century power is our most winsome witness. While more can be said, I want to emphasize that such a power makes the ideas of Christian doctrine plausible. Further, it highlights the Godward direction of our innermost selves and the satiation associated with participation in the life of God.
Plausibility Structure
A 21st-century power creates a different kind of “plausibility structure” for the Christian life. The expression comes from sociologist Peter Berger and conveys a way of converting ideas to practice. It is a system of meaning that demonstrates the plausibility of ideas and beliefs, a foundation for believability.
As an example, a friend once shared his plans for a family vacation at an all-inclusive yet highly remote destination. His children, however, were resistant. Why? Because there was no internet. They literally could not imagine a destination so primitive as to be digitally disconnected from the world. This was not mere stubbornness; it was unthinkable, unlivable. The idea of an internet-less world, particularly for digital natives, was simply not plausible.
This is important because there is a need to have a plausibility structure for the virtue, holiness, and life of faith that we espouse as Christ followers. People need to see the demonstration of our beliefs (not just hear our words and opinions). Western culture is less hospitable and certainly less receptive to what is perceived as finger-wagging moralism or propositional arguments.
I remember an exchange several years ago where two people were discussing the Christian victory that Christ-followers are called to model. “Show me one person who exhibits the holiness you say is so important,” said the first person skeptically. “I don’t need to show you,” said the second. “It’s in the Bible.”
I know what the respondent meant by their comment. And while I affirm the authority of Scripture, such an argument will, at best, fall flat in today’s “third culture” environment, a Philip Rieff expression used to define cultures that no longer organize around transcendent beliefs or considerations. Appealing to the Bible while ignoring the behavior of its adherents is reminiscent of the pithy bumper sticker: “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.” The problem with these statements is that they advance a “do as I say and not as I do” theology in an environment where the very currency of our words is funded by how we live our life. As author Mike Cosper writes in his review of James K.A. Smith’s book How (Not) to be Secular, we are no longer in an “Evidence that Demands a Verdict” age.
For this reason, theologians such as Alison Milbank have thoughtfully advanced “imaginative apologetics” where literature, poetry, music, and the arts are vehicles to awaken our religious sensibilities and draw us out of a buffered, immanent framework of understanding. This is important because in such a framework the argument for belief is performed, not simply asserted.
Like the artistic mediums Milbank encourages, our very lives constitute an “argument.” When we perform, exhibit, and demonstrate the fruit of Christian wisdom, the victory of God’s power in our lives, and the joy, peace, and hope that accompanies our faith, we make the Christian life and its claims plausible. In the 21st century, seeing really is believing.
An old Simon and Garfunkel tune “Kathy’s Song” ends with this stanza:
And so you see I have come to doubt, all that I once held as true;
I stand alone without beliefs, the only truth I know is you.
In my own experience, the teaching and doctrine of the Christian faith “took” to me because it was made plausible. Moreover, it was plausible because I saw it in the lives of others; I saw “truth” embodied and enacted around me.
Eudaimonia and the Life We Were Made For
The NRSV translation of Ephesians 2:10 says, “For we are what he has made us. Created in Christ Jesus for good works which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (italics mine). The suggestion that our lives are purposed and directional will offend the modern penchant toward expressive individualism and the belief that we create and re-create ourselves out of the raw material of our environment and a choice-driven consumer marketplace. Here, freedom is associated with ever expanding options and, therefore, institutions such as religion threaten to limit the boundaries of self-expression.
Unsurprisingly, religion and specifically Christianity are often characterized in a rather unattractive manner. As Jonathan Haidt writes in The Righteous Mind, “Devout Christians are often lampooned by secular liberals as uptight, pleasure-fearing prudes.” This suggests that Christ-followers suffer a boring, prudish, puritanical life while other non-Christians sow their wild oats in an enviable series of unrestrained acts of pleasure. But, as one variation of the story goes, in eternity the categories will alternate and Christians will experience eternal euphoria while earthly pleasure seekers will be condemned to a miserable eternity.
This is a bad story grounded in bad theology. The view that religion is an “opium” to suffer life’s unpleasantries and conditions is hardly a new idea. But it is also not a Biblical idea. Paul talks about “taking hold of the life that really is life” (I Tim 6:19) and “fullness in Christ” (Col 2:10). Christ invites the weary into rhythms of rest (Matt 11:28-30) and a full, abundant life (John 10:10).
Of course, pursuing Christ’s invitation to the “abundant life” does not shield us from life’s complexities such as suffering, hurt, loss, ignorance, and mistakes. Nor does it promise to be easy, safe, or tame. But we are offered a life of completeness and wholeness or, as Charles Taylor puts it, “fullness.”
Popularized by Aristotle, Eudaimonia is the ancient understanding which asserts that our beliefs and practices translate into a happy, flourishing, holistic life. Albert Outler, the famous Wesleyan scholar, described Wesley as a “eudaemonist.” In other words, Wesleyan theology asserts that the holy life is not something we must suffer in the here and now—rather, it is our best life. It is an invitation, not a mandate; an optimistic theology, not a dreary moralism. “[T]rue religion,” writes John Wesley, “or a heart right toward God and man, implies happiness as well as holiness.”
This is helpfully illustrated by considering the claim that Christians can have “peace.” Admittedly, I used to chafe at the idea that “peace” was a fruit of the spirit. It is not a characteristic often manifest in believers, and certainly not in myself. I don’t feel calm when I am stuck in traffic. I am not in a state of bliss when I am trying to meet an important deadline. I don’t have a sense of peace when I encounter social injustice.
Yet all of this assumes that peace is a buzzy state of perpetual contentment. But what if peace had less to do with mental placidity and more to do with a kind of spiritual fulfillment? Put differently, perhaps we should understand peace to mean we are no longer looking. It is the place where our deepest affections and loves have been met; a destination where our desires do not come back void.
Emily Dickinson’s famous poem Wild Nights captures this quite well.
Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!
The poem reads as overtly sexual. One cannot miss the erotic message. Importantly, though, “eros” in its ancient understanding meant something more like “yearning.” And in the Christian faith tradition, we believe that God is the object, the destination, of our deepest yearnings.
One is reminded of Augustine’s famous statement at the beginning of Confessions: “Lord, you have made us for yourself. And restless are our hearts until they find their rest in thee.” As Gary Wills’ translation puts it, “You made us tilted toward you, and our heart is unstable until stabilized in you.” If we are relationally constituted beings, and if we have an ontological “tilt” toward God in our creation, then peace means being “stabilized” in participation in the life of God—participating in that which we were meant to participate in. This is not peace as tranquility; it is peace as satiation. “Done with the compass, done with the chart.”
Conclusion:
Modern advances have fundamentally transformed how our lives are governed. We inhabit a technocratic era that has effectively harnessed complex technological advancement and ubiquitous information to solve pressing social, political, and economic problems. Moreover, we all benefit from these advances—in ways seen and unseen.
But has this progress eclipsed the role of religious authority in our lives? If religion’s value is proportionate to properties such as physical healing or communal bonding, then yes, we have other means of achieving those ends today. However, if the hope is that technology will appease a “restless” heart, purify my inclinations, empty self-centeredness, love the unlovable, compel service, and beget “fullness”—the answer, I submit, is unequivocally no.
This power, a 21st-century power, cannot be mapped to innovative advances bubbling up in our culture. Moreover, it is not a self-manufactured power originating from within me through human effort or Pelagian free will. The power I have described is God’s power in us. I submit that such power is our most effective witness in our present moment.
When we perform our argument, we create a system of meaning and make plausible the seemingly counterintuitive ideas of God’s Kingdom. Further, the Christian faith tradition asserts fullness in participating in the life of God. To bind is to commit, and to commit is to limit. But, counterintuitively, in these very limitations we experience freedom, identity, and meaning.
This power is both life-giving and attractive. And while we cultivate such sensibilities in a nexus of habits and practices, it is not a power we can simply manufacture on our own. While we all benefit from the conveniences of modern technological growth, by God’s grace, may a spiritual 21st-century power come to define His people.
Dr. Kevin Brown is President of Asbury University in Wilmore, Ky.