The Church in a New Day: Three Challenges [Firebrand Big Read]
Photo by design-beast
Amid the skepticism of the post-Enlightenment era, an important task of Christian thinkers was to show the rationality of Christianity. Writers like Peter Kreeft, Tim Keller, and William Lane Craig are examples of brilliant thinkers who have addressed the questions of late modernity. They showed us that Christianity made sense.
Other challenges confront us, however. We may show that Christian belief is rational, but this doesn’t mean it is true, good, or compelling. The task of apologetics today is often to demonstrate that Christianity is good. Does it promote human flourishing? Is it moral? Does it provide meaning? Can it address our feelings of loneliness, isolation, and alienation? Along these lines, Roman Catholic Bishop Robert Barron has been most helpful, as have other public intellectuals such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Jordan Peterson. Nevertheless we have considerably more work to do to counter misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the faith. Peter teaches us, “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander” (1 Pet 3:15-16). In what follows, I’ll discuss three challenges we face in this current age as we explain the reason for our hope to unbelievers: morality, meaning, and community.
1. The Challenge of Morality
Many people today question whether Christianity is moral. Opponents of traditional Christianity level several charges. First of all, they say, Christianity restricts individual freedom, particularly on matters of sex, gender identity, and procreation. They’re right about this. Moreover, our faith, if it is sufficiently understood, also imposes other restrictions on our freedom. For example:
Our possessions are not our own. They are ultimately God’s, and we should use our finances in ways that honor God’s will.
Our time is not our own. We honor God on the sabbath. We take time in prayer. We attend upon the means of grace.
Our families are not our own. The bond of Christian marriage places upon us obligations of fidelity, not just in matters of sex, but in mutual respect and love. We are compelled to raise up our children in the faith to the best of our abilities.
Our faith restricts our freedom in many ways.
Is this a bad thing, though? Think of a life of entirely unfettered freedom. Imagine the damage one would do to other people through such a life. Even the most libertine movements have certain dos and don’ts, things one can and cannot say, thoughts one can or cannot express aloud. No one lives in complete liberty, and that is a good thing. The question is the extent to which these restrictions promote or inhibit human flourishing.
As Christians, we believe we flourish best when we live in accordance with the will of God. God saves us from ourselves. Most people will admit (when they think about it) that a life of navel-gazing is neither happy nor good. It is, in fact, a form of misery. Theologians describe this kind of life as incurvatus in se—curved in on itself. That sounds painful, doesn't it? But how do we move beyond it? How do we grow beyond the obsession with the self and self-expression?
We do this by focusing on something beyond ourselves, but what is that? To focus on other people is good, but why is that any better than focusing on myself? Many of us feel intuitively that to live for others is better than to live selfishly, but why is it better? On what grounds do we make that claim? If our answer is simply that it feels better or is fulfilling, then we are back to the focus on the self. We don’t just want to feel like we are living with purpose. We want to live with real purpose. But that requires some kind of transcendent vision of reality. The God who became one of us, who lived and died in the person of Jesus, shows us how to understand that reality. Jesus shows us life that is both abundant and good.
We must also reckon with the difficult truth that, on the question of the goodness of Christianity, we Christians are often our own worst enemies. When we behave in ways inconsistent with our faith, we demonstrate that we don’t really believe what we profess. People assume, then, that we must have some other reason for our Christian faith—fear, a desire for control, political power, etc. The reason Jesus was so hard on the scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23 is that they were “hypocrites”: they professed to honor God while primarily seeking their own gain. When we are involved in scandals, when we behave callously or hatefully, when we demean and embarrass other people, when we put politics and power ahead of faith, we tear down what we purport to build up.
2. The Challenge of Meaning
I have an unscientific theory that the intensity of political discourse in recent years correlates to the decline of Christian faith in the West. People need meaning. They need stories by which they can understand their own lives. For many in the West, the Christian faith provided that meaning, and the church provided the story. Week after week in worship, people sang the songs, prayed the prayers, and heard the stories of our faith. At least on Sundays, they were immersed in the great Christian narrative of salvation. As church attendance declined, so did the extent of Christian formation. Yet we can’t live without something to make sense of our lives. Nature abhors a vacuum. With the advent of cable news, the internet, and social media, politics and ideology rushed in to fill the void.
Moreover, there are massive financial incentives to keep politics and ideology in front of us. Emotional responses, especially responses of anger, generate clicks. Clicks generate visibility and income. Plenty of people realize this and capitalize on it. Their goal is to stir up controversy in order to keep us watching and listening to their YouTube channels and podcasts. They are masters of the attention economy. And so we walk along the paths they lay out for us, feeding our dopamine addiction, normally unaware that all of this attention we focus on the Tucker Carlsons and Rachel Maddows of this world distracts us from the knowledge and love of God.
Politics and ideological battles can provide meaning to life. They provide their own stories. Yet all forms of meaning are not created equal. Different stories shape us in different ways, and not always for the good. Likewise one might find meaning in playing the guitar, cooking, running, or art. These can be edifying pursuits, and even good for society, but they can never ultimately satisfy us. The goodness they offer is derivative of the goodness of God. Augustine put this with characteristic beauty: “The good things which you love are all from God, but they are good and sweet only as long as they are used to do his will. They will rightly turn bitter if God is spurned and the things that come from him are wrongly loved. Why do you still choose to travel by this hard and arduous path? There is no rest to be found where you seek it. In the land of death you try to find a happy life: it is not there. How can life be happy where there is no life at all?” (Confessions, 4:12).
Our faith can provide meaning in a way that nothing else in this world can. It tells us who we are: beings who are created good but marred by sin. It explains that the angst, alienation, and longing we so commonly experience as humans comes from the fact that we are estranged from God. It tells us that, though we were made to be in relationship with this God, we are separated from him by our sin. Yet here is the good news: he has given us a way back. He loves us so much that he became one of us. He has seen all the ways we’ve hurt ourselves and other people, and he has taken this upon himself so that we can be healed. And when he rose from the dead, he gave us a glimpse of our future, one in which we are at peace with God and alive in eternity. Death is not the end. Our end—our telos—is life and love.
3. The Challenge of Community
We live in a lonely world. In 2023 the U.S. Surgeon General’s Office issued a report called Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation. At one level this seems counterintuitive. The internet and social media have given us greater capacity to communicate than at any point in human history. Yet we are increasingly lonely. Why? Because the internet and social media give the illusion of connection without the substance. We view curated images of one another. We see what others want us to see. As a result, we never really know others, nor do they know us. Thus true friendship and community elude us.
We can identify other reasons for loneliness as well. Even five years later, we feel the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the Surgeon General’s report, “Social connection continued to decline during the COVID-19 pandemic, with one study finding a 16% decrease in network size from June 2019 to June 2020 among participants.” Additionally, family structure has eroded in the West. Parts of the country have been overtaken by an opioid epidemic. Political disagreements sometimes rupture friendships and family ties. Cultural inertia continually pushes us toward isolation.
The decline of true friendship and community means a few things. First, it means we cannot rely on others for help. If we are not truly known, then others will not know us in our weakness. We need others to help us along when the weightiness of our lives becomes difficult to bear. I can recall times when my family and I had all we could handle and then some. When my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome, the Christian community rallied around our family. This likewise happened when my family experienced a house fire. Our community provided heroic support. Everyone needs this kind of help at one point or another. Without such community, despair is a ready companion.
The loss of true friendship and community also means we cannot experience the joy that comes from communal love. I’m not talking about getting together with friends for a laugh, as fun as that is. I mean lasting relationships in which people will our good and we will theirs. There is joy in experiencing that kind of love. Proverbs 18:24 reminds us, “One who has unreliable friends soon comes to ruin, but there is a friend who sticks closer than a brother.” Yet that kind of friendship is ever scarcer in this atomized existence in which so many live today.
For a few reasons, the church has a unique opportunity to provide the kind of community that many long for but few experience. First, the Christian faith holds that each of us is broken. We suffer from the spiritual sickness of sin. Right off the bat, then, we dismiss the toxic fiction of the person who has it all together. I don’t, and you don’t either. Neither does that family with the perfect picture where everyone is wearing white linen and smiling in front of a sunset on the beach. That family may or may not be thriving, but mom, dad, and kids still face struggles in life. Such is the nature of human existence. Our faith tells us the truth about ourselves and others. It compels us to move past unrealistic fantasies. Now we can begin to know one another. Now meaningful relationships can begin.
Second, both Jesus and Paul conceived of the church as a family. In Romans 8:14-17 we read,
For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children. Now if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ, if indeed we share in his sufferings in order that we may also share in his glory.
Our salvation means we have the great privilege of calling God “Father.” The language of “brothers and sisters” in Christ is not just metaphorical. The spiritual kinship we have with other baptized Christians is just as real as the blood kinship we have with our natural families. At times it will supersede the natural family. Peter declared to Jesus that he and the other disciples had “left everything” to follow him (Mark 10:28). The loss of family was surely part of “everything.” Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, no one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields—along with persecutions—and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29-30). In other words, you have a new home, a new family, a new community. Our shared baptism, our faith commitments, our recognition of our brokenness, and our determination to love one another should mean that the church is the perfect answer to the epidemic of loneliness. If it is not, we have failed to live up to our best ideals.
Liberal Protestant thinkers have always believed that the way to build the church in the post-Enlightenment era is to modify the church’s teachings to keep up with a changing society. They believe people will not accept Christian proclamation that does not line up with the intellectual and moral assumptions of the cultural moment. The problem with this approach is that societies are always changing. No society is static. We might think we live in a new day—and we do. Yet it’s always a new day. If we constantly change our doctrines and ethics in accordance with the Zeitgeist, we will lose the continuity of Christian teaching across time. Our task is not to adapt our core beliefs to each new generation’s conventional wisdom, but to show how those core beliefs relate to the human condition in each new era. As the prophet Isaiah said, “The grass withers and the flowers fade, but the word of the Lord endures forever” (Isa 40:8).
David F. Watson is Lead Editor of Firebrand. He serves as Academic Dean and Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. Starting July 1, he will begin serving as president of Asbury Theological Seminary.