secularizing-religion-september-october-2013

vol.22 | no.5 | September-October 2013 | $6.50

Secularizing Religion

Sep tember - October 2013

Know what you believe and why you believe it.

BRINGING THE RICH RESOURCES OF THE REFORMATION TO THE HALLWAY OF MERE CHRISTIANITY. C. S. Lewis famously remarked that “mere Christianity” is like a hallway where real conversations between Christians of different convictions can begin and develop over time as we emerge from our various rooms to speak of Christ and his gospel to one another. For twenty years, White Horse Inn has hosted this conversation both on our radio show, White Horse Inn, and in our magazine, Modern Reformation.

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features VOL.22 | NO.5 | SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2013

42 Losing Our Kids to Secularism The Decline of Religion?

BY SHA N E ROSEN THAL

Q & A W I T H ST EVE BRUCE

22 26 COVER ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LEFKOWTIZ

The Secularization Thesis

BY MICHAEL S. HORTON

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departments 04 05

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

BY RYAN G LO MSRUD

THEOLOGY ›› The Megachurch

and the Politics of Desire

BY PI OT R J. MAŁYSZ

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FROM THE HALLWAY ››

How to Listen to a Building

BY C. R. WI LEY AND DAVI D STO C KER

16

THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD ››

47 54 56

BOOK REVIEWS

Part V: The Sin and the Fury

BY ZACH KEELE

EAGLETON, HOLMES, AND MARTIN

GEEK SQUAD ››

Back to School Reading BACK PAGE ››

“Nones” by the Numbers Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Ryan Glomsrud Managing Editor Patricia Anders Assistant Editor Brooke Ventura Marketing Director Michele Tedrick Design Director José Reyes for Metaleap Creative, metaleapcreative.com Department Editors Ryan Glomsrud (Letter from the Editor & Reviews), Michael S. Horton Designer Tiffany Forrester Copy Editor Elizabeth Isaac Proofreader Ann Smith Modern Reformation © 2013 All rights reserved. ISSN-1076-7169 Modern Reformation (Subscription Department) P.O. Box 460565 Escondido, CA 92046 (855) 492-1674 info@modernreformation.org www.modernreformation.org Subscription Information US 1 YR $32. 2 YR $58. US 3 YR $78. Digital Only 1 YR $25. US Student 1 YR $26. Canada add $8 per year for postage. Foreign add $9 per year for postage.

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LETTER from the EDITOR

RYAN GLOMSRUD executive editor

Modern Reformation does not believe that the world today is necessarily any more sinful now than it was five hundred or a thousand years ago.

Scripture speaks simply of two ages after the fall of Adam: this present evil age and the age that is to come (Heb. 6:5; 2 Cor. 4:4). To be sure, Jesus did inaugurate his kingdom decisively over two thousand years ago, and his rule does break into our lives by his grace so that we already anticipate something of the age to come. But for the moment we live in this age that is “passing away,” an evil age that defines our day just as much as it did in the days of the apostles—or the days of Charlemagne, Henry VIII, and George Washington (Gal. 1:4; 1 Cor. 7:31). This does not mean, however, that cultures do not manifest human sinfulness in peculiar ways at different times, or that the church does not wax and wane in holiness. In fact, one could argue from Scripture that each period of history is likely to manifest certain unique aspects of our sinful condition, ones that are always fraught with new dangers for the church.

This issue introduces a challenging debate that has raged over the past twenty-five years: The question of whether and how the modern world has transformed religion in general and Christianity in particular. Largely academic and usually referred to as the “secularization debate,” its significance for our lives together as Christians is enormous.

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We think it is such an important debate that we are asking you to put on your thinking caps and work through these essays with patience and care. We let Steve Bruce, one of the leading proponents of the “secularization thesis,” introduce the topic before Editor-in-Chief Michael Horton elaborates and explains its significance for lay Christians in a series of short essays. There are several surprising conclusions to draw, starting with the notion that much of the way the evangelical faith is practiced today is itself part of the secularizing transformation of Christianity.

Other articles in this issue are given over to provocative explorations of human sinfulness in different times and cultural locations: Rev. Zach Keele on the wickedness cultivated in Israel and God’s roaring justice revealed in Lamentations; C. R. Wiley and David Stocker on church architecture in this passing “post-industrial” age; Lutheran professor Piotr Małysz on consumer dynamics in the megachurch; and Shane Rosenthal on cultural apologetics.

Pointing out the fact that the world and the church experience secularization is not meant to scare believers, like so many dispensationalist “Left Behind” stories. This issue is not about fear mongering. Nor is it meant to spark a new revival or awakening of religion, which is itself a failed modern response to secularization. Rather, we hope to motivate laypeople and leaders to pursue a reformation of the church. It is not just the recovery of sound doctrine that will ward off secularization. One take-away from this issue is that we must recover the routines and practices of faith that center on the public ministry of Word and Sacrament and extend to a life of discipleship. For these practices of faith presuppose a different reality than our secularized age, one in which we are God’s creatures, fallen in sin but redeemed by Christ, receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken.

THEOLOGY

H C R U H C GE A

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E R I S E D F O S C I T I L O EP H T AND

by PIOTR J. MAŁYSZ

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THEOLOGY

ven before I moved to the South two years ago, I was a direct and indirect observer of the megachurch culture. In this article, I would like to venture a handful of observations, crystallized by a recent visit to a Bible Belt megachurch. It is important to note at the outset that no particular church is meant here, though the visit did prove to be a catalyst for this wider set of reflections. Also, what I am about to say should be viewed as a preliminary and rough sketch in need of elaboration, rather than a fully fleshed-out account; as such, the observations offered here are an invitation to further conversation. The approach taken, moreover, is a theorizing one: its goal is to capture the dynamics of the megachurch. It must be kept in mind that theorizing is by definition a universalizing process: it seeks to grasp the essence of structures and processes, but this may be at odds with individual motivations and hearts, which I by no means seek to impugn.

This being said, I seek materially to make two related points: the first concerns the inevitable law-centeredness of the megachurch, and the second its inescapable ecclesiological thinness.

This inevitability comes to light when one compares the role of the worshiper in the megachurch with the way Freud conceptualized the role of an individual in civilization. I will use the latter as a useful lens.

CO N SU MI NG DE S IRE Just as society, according to Freud, harnesses our libidinal energy for community building, so also the megachurch seeks to tap into something all too natural and already given. It seeks to harness

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our consumerist energy for the sake of kingdom building. How does this take place?

For Freud, the libido, or love drive, makes us crave the satisfaction of instinctual desire and hence societal companionship. But it has at the same time to be constrained by society for society’s sake. Society, while crucially relying on the libido, cannot afford to allow the libido to run wild. Society must rather sublimate the libido into constructive energy. Thus with its laws that restrict our sexual self-expression and put us to work instead, society, says Freud, inevitably makes us unhappy.1 What drives the modern megachurch ethos is eerily similar. The megachurch wishes to cash in on our desire for self-satisfaction. It wishes to harness our consumerist attitude to church, our

“THE GENERIC CHARACTER OF MEGACHURCH SPACE… REINFORCES ONE’S FOCUS ON ONE’S OWN EXPERIENCE, ON ONE’S OWN CHURCH CONSUMPTION.” "church consuming." This very desire gives rise to the megachurch in the first place. In appealing to this desire, the megachurch reconfigures worship space to purge it of all ritualistic and seemingly legalistic elements in order to allow desire to come to the forefront and flow freely. Thus it becomes possible to preach on the importance and centrality of the cross in a space that does not burden one with the sight of the cross—or anything that might distract me from my own experience, from the satisfaction of my desire, and point to a different character of this space (a space, for example, in which I might have to whisper while talking to someone out of sheer reverence for the place). But in the end, though the megachurch crucially relies on the unleashing of the consumerist drive, it too cannot allow this drive to go unchecked and to remain free-flowing. For this drive can just as easily become the megachurch’s undoing. Consequently, the drive is sublimated into a kingdom-building project, embodied in exhortations and commandments. “We make disciples because it has become our soul’s supreme desire,” David Platt instructs emphatically.2 There are several things to note here. First, the megachurch crucially relies on the presence and persistence of the consumerist drive, even though it immediately moves on to capture and reorient it, so as to prevent its own implosion. But it cannot afford to dispense with this drive. This, in turn, underscores the consistently legal character of the megachurch: it is a law-centered structure that operates on the exact same basis as the larger society. Just as society is fundamentally law-textured and can never become anything else, thus rendering

the quest for a paradisiacal society futile, so also is the structure of the megachurch. Then, because society must ultimately police our libido, it cannot but create a sense of discontentment and the desire for a happier—thinner!—social order. To prevent this, society puts to shame our selfish instincts, distracts us from them, and harnesses their energy for its own sake. Society crucially depends on being able to generate a sense of guilt in us. Likewise, the megachurch, once it gets one’s desire for consumption flowing, ultimately aims at making one feel guilty about this very desire. Thereupon, it provides legal outlets through which one can undertake to alleviate one’s consumer guilt. Just as society has its inevitable discontents, so also the megachurch must have its unhappy restlessness.

RO OT LE SSNE SS What is of fundamental importance in the picture just outlined is that transformation can never be so radical as to set aside the original drive, and the fostering of a sense of guilt remains essential to not allowing the drive to get out of control. In theological terms, all that society and the megachurch need is the law, but not the gospel. The gospel is too radical.

But obviously the megachurch markets itself as gospel-centered and operating under the banner of the gospel. And to be sure, feeding the faithful through Word and Sacrament and allowing them rest and assurance in God’s unconditional favor, so central to the church’s identity, are not explicitly or entirely dispensed with. It is interesting to observe, therefore, what happens to the gospel to assure that one’s personal transformation remains thin and one’s sense of guilt operative.

The generic character of megachurch space, as already noted, reinforces one’s focus on one’s own experience, on one’s own church consumption. It enables one to inhabit and be in touch with oneself. What needs to be added here is that it is this singular focus that, in turn, facilitates the deradicalization of the gospel. It enables the absorption of the gospel into one’s experience. What disappears is any sense of God’s work—public work—in the midst and on behalf of the assembly. Even the presence of God, however unspecified, loses its objective character.

What is left of the gospel is God’s impact on me.

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THEOLOGY

Thus neutered, the gospel is simply absorbed into the overarching legal framework: the dominant mechanism of controlled release and deployment of the consumerist drive. In consequence, the gospel becomes at best little more than a nondimensional transition point, a hinge that connects overflowing desire to its sublimation in various projects and undertakings. If it now has any external manifestation, this becomes indistinguishable from exhortation. One should note that in this form, it reinforces the requisite thinness of personal transformation. More important, the gospel can now stand side by side with a sense of guilt. In fact, internally it assumes the form of the Freudian superego towering over myself. Of this ego I constantly fall short, and toward union with it I am constantly exhorted to strive. Briefly put, Word and Sacrament—the gospel itself!—become law, my own work, my own transformation of myself, my own never-ending overcoming of the guilt within, instead of God’s work for me in which I can simply find rest. The law-centered identity of the megachurch remains unassailed.

This vertically oriented vacuum at the core of the megachurch is perpetuated further on the horizontal, communal level. What plays into this is the very nature of the consumerist drive. As William Cavanaugh and Zygmunt Bauman both note, consumerism is not really attachment to things but a kind of detachment.3 It is a spiritual posture that seeks satisfaction not in things but solely in the desire for them.4 Consumers are not hoarders; consumers are ascetics who cultivate no attachment to anything in particular, at least not for long. Similarly, church consuming focuses not on the whence, who, and with-whom that define people, things, and places. For church consumers following the lead of their desires, locality is determined not by the presence of God giving himself in Word and Sacrament, by God’s own commitment; instead, it is determined by the experience of God within and by the restlessness of desire that quests for this experience.

I am the locality of the church on the move; any shopping mall that caters to my desire will do.

Multiple campuses, generic spaces not marked

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by anything, as well as the use of technology—all these only reinforce the sense of detachment from the fabric of the community and of life and feed into one’s focus on oneself.

Unfortunately, this hardly changes when for the sake of its own self-preservation the megachurch sublimates one’s consumerist desire into kingdom building and redirects it toward outreach. (In some cases, we must note, this sublimation is extremely thin, as in the prosperity gospel; in others, it is incomparably more robust.) But not even then, apparently, is it capable of filling the vacuum and anchoring the restless drifters. The reason again is more broadly cultural. It has to do with what the culture perceives as the fundamental problem and how it responds to this problem. As Samuel Wells has argued, modern culture’s meaning-making strategies revolve largely around the problem of mortality.5 As a cultural response, consumerism enables a posture of personal detachment from specific localities, things, and people, thus allowing one to remain unperturbed in the face of death. In its never-ending pursuit of satisfaction, consumerism also keeps one preoccupied with one’s desire and reorients one’s life away from having to come face to face with one’s own mortality. Lack of entanglement, on the one hand, and keeping busy, on the other, help one deal with the reality of death.

Because the megachurch crucially relies on consumerist desire, it falls into this broader cultural pattern; and it is this that further contributes to the vacuum at its heart, emptying it not only of God’s objective work but also of human work. The megachurch’s fundamental focus is on saving people and reaching out to the lost—and this is, indeed, praiseworthy. But as a sublimation of consumerist desire, it raises the question of what happens once salvation has been “done” for and to a person, when the problem of mortality has been addressed. It appears that the person becomes unessential, insofar as one simply turns to a new disciple-target to “do” a salvation job on. The former target possesses only utilitarian value, in that he is now also,

together with one, in the business of the megachurch’s self-renewal. What thus happens is that, even as sublimated into kingdom building, the consumerist desire does not lose its character of consuming as a spiritual practice of detachment: it “consumes” people only for the sake of cultivating a similar posture in them. In all, one’s submission to the prodding of the superego endows one’s life with purpose in the face of one’s mortality, a purpose only strengthened by the conviction that one’s constant busyness has saved others from the throes of death. However, in this cultural approach, the megachurch exists only on the boundary between itself and the world, where salvation can constantly be done to and for people. Its center remains empty.

And it remains empty even when the worshiping crowd splinters into a host of small groups. For those only perpetuate the consumers’ self-interest, as people go in pursuit of whatever interests or entertains them, following their own age and class demographic and the people they get along with. Whether these small and unstable groups truly amount to communities, however free floating—whether they truly embody Christ's body—is a question that must be pressed here. Besides, there is at least some irony in the fact that the church predicates the authenticity of one’s Christianity on making disciples of all nations, and yet enables one to associate only with people one likes (unless this, too, is seen as an opportunity for desire sublimation)!

F INDI NG S O L I D G R O U N D

“THE RESPONSE TO SIN OUGHT RATHER TO BE THAT OF IMMANUEL: JUST AS GOD IS WITH US, WE LIKEWISE ARE WITH EACH OTHER, FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE.” peace with God and are gathered locally into and constantly renewed as a community. The church does not hover as a generic entity over particular locations, carried around in one’s experience.

Rather, radiating from the work of God in its midst, it becomes closely knit as a community, a community that is further grounded in its particular socio-geographic location.

But for that to take place one needs something more than a thin transformation and an ongoing sense of guilt. Not a politics of desire, but a renewal of desire. One needs God to be at work in a way that takes one out of oneself—into God and one’s neighbor. And this, I conclude, the megachurch cannot afford and is unable to do.

Piotr J. Małysz (ThD, Harvard University) teaches the history

In response, as Samuel Wells has also noted, humanity’s problem is not only the problem of death but also the problem of isolation. To put it more theologically, sin manifests itself not only in mortality but also as godlessness and debilitating self-focus: that is, as isolation from God and from the neighbor. Therefore, the response to sin is not simply “doing” salvation for and to others. The response to sin ought rather to be that of Immanuel: just as God is with us, we likewise are with each other, for better or for worse. What this means ecclesiologically is that the church is locally where God offers himself through Word and Sacrament and, through this work of God outside of us, where the faithful come to rest in the assurance of

of Christian thought at Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Alabama. He is the author of Trinity, Freedom and Love: An Engagement with the Theology of Eberhard Jüngel (T&T Clark, 2012), as well as articles on Luther, Barth, and Hegel. He also serves as a pastor for an African-American Lutheran congregation in Birmingham.

1 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents (1930; repr. Eastford, CT: Martino Fine Books, 2010).

2 David Platt, Follow Me: A Call to Die, A Call to Live (Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House, 2013), 95.

3 William Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economics and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008).

4 Zygmunt Bauman writes: “Consumerism is not about accumulating goods (who gathers goods must put up as well with heavy suitcases and cluttered houses), but about using them and disposing of them after use to make room for other goods and their uses.” Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2003), 49.

5 Samuel Wells, “Rethinking Service,” The Cresset 76:4 (Easter 2013), 6–14.

This article can also be found at http://bit.ly/12k6zw0.

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F R O M t h e H A L LWAY

HOW TO LISTEN TO A BUILDING

by C. R. WILEY and DAVID STOCKER

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nce upon a time, the people who built churches believed the buildings could talk. Today, many of the people who build churches for a living don’t know what their buildings are saying.

The buildings still speak, but mostly the messages are unintentional. And regrettably some church buildings actually contradict what is being preached from the pulpits in those buildings.

The authors of this little essay are Presbyterians, and we love the Reformed faith: one is a pastor and the other an architect. The pastor has a background in the visual arts—his artist mother enrolled him in his first art school when he was only 7. The architect is that new breed who actually believes in old truths about architecture. Together, we feel quite out of place at times—like men wearing tuxedos to the beach. We wonder why no one understands us when we talk about listening to buildings.

We’ve got stories. In the pastor’s previous church, the congregation hired a design-build firm that specialized in churches to create an 8,000-square-foot education wing with the standard gymnasium/ fellowship hall combo tacked on. The first architectural drawing included a roofline for the new gym that dwarfed the existing sanctuary. The pastor asked incredulously, “What does that say?” The

man who had built numerous churches with this firm looked at the pastor blankly and shrugged. “It says,” the pastor told him, “that the important things that happen in our church happen in the gym.” The man didn’t get it. The pastor told him to lower the roofline and make sure the most prominent feature of the church remained the sanctuary. The man still didn’t get it. The pastor couldn’t determine whether the incomprehension was due to the fact that he believed buildings talk or that the man truly did believe a gym is more important than a sanctuary.

W H Y WE HAVE GONE DE A F We conservatives are plain-speaking people. That’s why, when it comes to art, Pilgrim’s Progress is what we go for. It is a fine book, a genuine classic—but the MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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reason we like it so much is because it is almost impossible to misinterpret; seemingly, it performs its work like a doctor on a patient under anesthesia. It promises clear and unequivocal truth. And because most art cannot make a similar promise, we tend to dismiss meaning in the arts. But the most plainly spoken truths still require some interpretation. Even Bunyan knew this; that’s why one of his characters is named Interpreter. This shouldn’t surprise us; after all, it’s not as though there hasn’t been a lot of debate over the plain little proposition, “This is my body...”

We will always need interpretation on this side of the darkened glass. But that doesn’t mean that any interpretation is just as good as another; nor does it mean we are on our own when it comes to interpretation—whether we are interpreting nature or art.

Above all, the Bible is the inerrant guide. And while we can use Scripture to interpret Scripture,

sooner or later we have to look outside of its pages to understand it. Take the resurrection— it happened in history before it was recorded in the Bible as history. It was meaningful before it was interpreted by the apostles. We can say the same for the sun, the trees, the flowers, and even bread; before the Bible was, they were. Speaking of bread, it is worth remembering that bread is something people make, and yet Christ used it to reveal himself.

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“WITHOUT AN APPRECIATION FOR THE INTRINSIC MESSAGES OF OUR MEDIA, WE CAN CONTRADICT OURSELVES WITHOUT REALIZING IT—OR WE CAN MAKE SO MUCH NOISE, WE ACTUALLY DROWN OUT WHAT WE ARE TRYING TO SAY.” Failure to recognize this rather commonsense truth is one reason why there is so much philistinism in the church. But it gets worse.

This failure to appreciate meaning outside the Bible leads to absurd assertions about the “neutrality” of cultural forms—as though anything can be used to say anything we want—as though the world is made of Silly Putty and we can impress images onto things without having to account for intrinsic meanings. We behave like those atheists who insist that all meaning is culturally determined. But the Ten Commandments were not written in Silly Putty; they were engraved on stone because stone says something about the Ten Commandments. Without an appreciation for the intrinsic messages of our media, we can contradict ourselves without realizing it—or we can make so much noise, we actually drown out what we are trying to say.

Perhaps one reason church leaders can’t hear what their buildings say is because they have never been encouraged to listen. We did some quick and thoroughly unscientific research.

We surveyed the course offerings in practical

MCDONALD'S AND WESTMINSTER CATHEDRAL

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few years ago, caught out by a heavy down pour...I took shelter in a...Westminster branch of McDonald’s. The mood

inside the restaurant was solemn and concentrated. Customers were eating alone, reading papers or staring at the brown tiles, masticating with a sternness and brusqueness besides which the atmosphere of a feeding shed would have appeared convivial and mannered. The restaurant’s true talent lay in the generation of anxiety.

The harsh lighting, the intermittent sound of frozen fries being sunk into vats of oil and the frenzied behavior of the counter staff invited thoughts of the loneliness and meaninglessness of existence in a random and violent universe….I cleared my table and walked out into the plaza immediately adjacent to the restaurant, where I properly noticed for the first time the incongruous and imposing Byzantine forms of Westminster Cathedral, its red

and white brick campanile soaring eighty-seven metres into the foggy London skies.

Drawn by rain and curiosity, I entered a cavernous hall, sunk into tarry darkness.…The facile din of the outer world had given way to awe and silence. Children stood close to their parents and looked around with an air of puzzled reverence.

Visitors instinctively whispered....The anonymity of the street had been subsumed by a peculiar

theology at four well-known and well-regarded Reformed seminaries to see what was being taught on the subject of theological aesthetics. We discovered that the answer is pretty much nothing. Since it wasn’t addressed under the heading of “practical theology,” one of us quipped that a new division should be created for “impractical theology.”

Why the neglect? One supposes an already overcrowded curriculum is partly to blame; but if the worship wars tell us anything, they tell us that theological aesthetics is very practical. Most pastors, however, are ill-equipped to address meaning in the arts. We do not mean to imply that a course or two in seminary would clear up everything—after dozens of credit hours in systematic theology and biblical studies, there is still plenty of room for disagreement on doctrine and biblical interpretation in local churches. But at least pastors would be more likely to look for normative patterns in the Bible, in theology, and yes, even in creation, rather than in the office park or the local Starbucks.

Our silence speaks to the world; it loudly asserts that meaning in art is arbitrary—that art is a zone of subjectivity; that the Logos, when speaking the world into being, left the meaning out of things, or at least failed to adequately connect appearances to meaning. It also says that we are at odds with the classical school of art—a school that taught us to discern meanings in creation and represent those meanings in the arts. When it comes to architecture, do we really share more common ground with modernist Philip Johnson than with classicist Christopher Wren?

kind of intimacy. Everything serious in human nature seemed to be called to the surface:

L E A RNI NG TO SP E A K AGA I N

thoughts about limits and infinity, about powerlessness and sublimity....After ten minutes in the cathedral, a range of ideas that would have been inconceivable outside began to assume an air of reasonableness…it seemed entirely probable that Jesus was the Son of God and had walked across the Sea of Galilee....Concepts that would have sounded demented forty metres away…had succeeded—through a work of architecture—in acquiring supreme significance and majesty.

ALAIN DE BOTTON, THE ARCHITECTURE OF HAPPINESS (NEW YORK: VINTAGE, 2008), 107–109.

The problem is partly a legacy of the church-growth movement with its crude appropriations of sociology and management techniques to increase the size of local churches. “Becoming all things to all people” (1 Cor. 9:22) is a favorite proof-text. But there is good reason to believe that the apostle Paul was doing something very different than what we refer to today as “packaging.” The church-growth movement implies that the cradle-to-grave cultures of the first century are no different in substance from the age-segmented and consumer-oriented lifestyle enclaves we know today. The apostle Paul MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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lived in a sinful world too, but he also lived in a world more attuned to the rhythms and patterns of creation. We live in a sick and dying postindustrial culture, one populated with self-absorbed and radically subjective individuals.

What are our buildings saying these days?

If they are modeled on the local Costco—those frictionless warehouses of consumption—why are we surprised by a consumerist approach to spiritual things? If we are postmodern hipsters, will our buildings—with all the self-congratulatory bricolage of medieval votive candles, glutenfree communion wafers, and Etsy-art foyers—say nothing more than “Jesus can be cool too”? Perhaps the best way to rchitecture for churches is a matter of gospel, and the be truly relevant in this dying gospel as understood by the Presbyterian/ Reformed culture is to perplex people by churches is worthy of proclamation. These two premgiving them buildings they don’t ises are seen in action at the time of the Reformation. The understand. Maybe needing an inherited Roman Catholic churches were not changed because interpreter is a good sign. Philip of aesthetic inclinations on the part of the Reformed clergy, thought so when he came upon or because of a new stylistic fad. They were changed because the Ethiopian eunuch. the gospel was so important Modernity has harmed the that the Reformers could not church like a stroke. Like the allow the churches to remain as victim of a stroke, we have lost they were. The Reformers were command of some of our faculacutely conscious of the power ties. We need therapy. We need of architecture and the constant help to speak again with forms message that it held for the peoconsistent with the gospel. The ple. Wherever the Reformation Christian tradition and its archiwent, the statues of Mary and tecture can be a great help. Let’s the saints were torn down, not rediscover the world our God for reasons of style, but because has given us and the Bible he they were temptation to idolatry. gave us to interpret it with and Not only in Switzerland, Germany go from there. If we do that, we and the Low Countries, but also throughout England, the stone will design buildings that are at altars were dismantled. They spoke too forcefully of the sacrifice once fresh and vibrant as a May of the Mass and obscured the finished work of Christ. Throughout morning and as rooted in the Europe, in humble country churches as well as the great catheBible as an old-growth redwood drals, the use of the various parts of the church underwent radical in the soil.

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change, again, not because of stylistic preference, but because of renewed emphasis on the gospel. It might be said that the Word of God challenged Medieval Romanism, and the Reformed responded with an attempt to transform these inherited buildings into structures suitable for biblical worship.

DONALD J. BRUGGNIK AND CARL H. DROPPERS, CHRIST AND ARCHITECTURE (GRAND RAPIDS: EERDMANS, 1965).

C. R. Wiley is senior pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Manchester in Manchester, Connecticut.

David Stocker is an architect in Dallas, Texas.

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BEELDENSTORM IN EEN KERK (OIL ON PANEL), DIRK VAN DELEN (C. 1630 AD).

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PART V

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THE SIN AND THE FURY

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by ZACH KEELE

H AT D O E S your sin deserve?

As Christians, we know our sin deserves punishment. It is displeasing to God. Yet how does our Lord really perceive it? What does his justice actually require? On the slopes of Sinai, we saw glimpses of glory in that sapphire pavement.

We beheld an impression of paradise, of what it is like to have communion with a blessed and holy God forever (Exod. 24:9–11). And yet, the steps up to that sapphire stage were lined with righteousness. They were carved out by the law. The one who does them shall live by them. The cherubim guarded that vertical ascent, chanting, “Only the righteous shall pass.” God’s people saw they needed righteousness to dwell on God’s holy hill.

We got a morsel, an appetizer, of this beautiful righteousness in King David, a man after God’s own heart. David kept the Lord’s commandments and followed him with his whole heart. Founded on his obedience, God granted to David a house, an eternal throne, and a son to build the temple and to reign

forever. Solomon ushered God’s people into a period of peace. He painted Jerusalem with gold. He raised the temple and the glory of God filled it, which gave us another reflection of glory. Solomon appeared to be the son who would open the gates of righteousness and march the people into God’s presence in his train.

But Solomon, the one on whom all our hopes seemed to be set, was an unworthy peg. He broke off from the wall weighed down by the idolatry of his myriad wives. And so we waited. We waited for the righteous king to bring us back to that sapphire pavement, to marshal Israel up the steps of law into God’s presence. Yet, as we waited for the righteous king, our hope became faint, our irritation mounting with heavy impatience. Instead of MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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T H E G R E AT E S T S T O R Y E V E R T O L D

finding righteousness, we discovered more and more sons of wickedness.

Ahab married the bride of Baal, the temptress of Astarte, who led Israel like Madam Folly down into the depths of Sheol. There were promising kings in the south, like Hezekiah and Josiah, but even these bright lights could not overcome the shadow of Manasseh. His rank depravity polluted the land. He erected false altars on every hill, under every green tree, even more than the Amorites before Israel (2 Kings 21:2–9).

Manasseh planted in Jerusalem the screams of Topheth, where they burned their infants alive to Molech. They seared the flesh of their babies for an idol (Jer. 19:5). This is the wickedness Manasseh cultivated in Jerusalem, and as the king led, so followed the people. These are the cries that God’s justice roared against as a lion on the day of the Lord.

God did send prophets, warning them and calling to them, “Repent, turn.” The people’s hearts, however, were rock solid in wickedness. They would not stand for God’s Word; they would not turn from their evil ways. And so, their sins started to pile up in God’s holy house. The holy place called after God’s own name became filled with the filthy laundry of Judah’s sin. Their depravity turned God’s place into a sewer. Where at Sinai we caught a glimpse of glory, now we are exposed to what sin deserves.

What occurs when wickedness comes into contact with holiness? What happens when the Lord’s holiness breaks out against his unholy people? The prophets had warned that the Day of the Lord was coming—the day when the Lord would stand and require justice. Therefore, on a hot fall day in Jerusalem, the dam of the Lord’s anger burst. The Day of the Lord gushed forth and it was not a day of salvation. It was not a day of the sun rising, but a day of darkness with thick clouds and the whirlwind of the Lord’s wrath. The Lord prepared a sacrifice on the Day of the Lord—but it was the people themselves (Zeph. 1:7).

The book of Lamentations bewails in mournful tones the darkness of that day. The Lord who was Israel’s father, who was Judah’s husband,

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stood as an enemy against his people (Lam. 2:5).

The Lord bent his bow and pointed his arrows of fury at his own wife without mercy (2:4). The Lord made Zion forget the Sabbath and festival (2:6). His indignation laid waste both king and priest. The law was no more and the prophets were cut off (2:9).

He forsook dwelling with his wicked people.

The Lord’s favor was removed and all those expressions of God’s love, care, and mercy were gone—the Lord’s wrath reigned instead. On the day of the Lord’s anger, no one escaped or survived (2:22). God-forsaken, swallowed up in the searing blackness of God’s fury, this is what sin deserves. A weeping and gnashing of teeth that has no cure, no end, is the holy judgment of God against sinners. Lamentations 2 puts us on a rope bridge peering into the fiery pit of hell. This is what justice requires for our sin.

And yet, among these cries, as we peer through the lens of Lamentations 2 into the crater of hell, there is one cry that rises above the rest, one shriek that is the most bitter of all: “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?”—“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). Yes, through the shadow of Lamentations 2, we can see Golgotha.

We can see a tree, a cursed cross, and upon that cross a man is nailed. A king is mocked and spit upon. The Word become flesh is hung, impaled upon that tree. The Righteous One dies. We see the wrath that Christ—the innocent one, the righteous one—takes upon himself. The punishments of Lamentations 2 are Christ’s wounds by which we are healed. We behold what our sins deserve, how Jesus is crushed for our wretched iniquities.

And so we witness our redemption, our atonement, our rescue from God’s holy wrath. We see how God in love can be both just and the justifier of those in Christ by faith, because Christ became sin and suffered our punishment, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Praise the Lord.

Zach Keele is pastor of Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Escondido, California.

Theology On Tap.

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LOSING OUR KIDS TO SECULARISM

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THE DECLINE OF RELIGION?

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THE SECULARIZATION THESIS

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THE DECLINE

OF RELIGION?

Q&A with STEVE BRUCE

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Modern Reformation recently asked Steve Bruce, University of Aberdeen sociologist and leading international authority on secularization, to discuss some of the major issues he raises in his important book Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford University Press, 2013).

What is the “Secularization Paradigm” and why has it come under fire in recent decades?

a. The Secularization Paradigm (SP) is often

taken to be the prediction that, with the passage of time, religion will die out. This is wrong.

I take the SP to be an attempt to explain the changes in the nature and social position of religion in Western industrial democracies that have accompanied modernization—say, from the end of the eighteenth century. Those changes are complex but they do form a common pattern. At the level of social structure we see the removal of the economy and polity from religious control (for example, religious precepts no longer hinder economic rationality and we allow unbelievers the vote), the gradual marginalization of religion, and the rise of toleration. At the level of culture, religion loses the power to provide the most convincing explanations and the best remedies. For the individual the key changes are religion’s shift from necessity to choice and the decline of dogmatism. Modern societies have “fundamentalist” enclaves, but most of us now accept that religion

PHOTOGRAPH OF COVENTRY CATHEDRAL BOMBARDED

BY THE GERMANS IN THE BLITZ OF 1940.

is a matter of private preference. Those changes are accompanied by a decline in the proportion of the population that takes religion seriously. Note that despite changes in intellectual fashion, the decline in religious adherence continues apace.

Critics of the secularization thesis often emphasize the intentional factors in the process—whether of secularists with a program to marginalize religion or believers with a program to choose their spiritual “products” in the marketplace. On the other hand, you underscore ways in which the process is driven largely by unintended consequences that make further development of modernization inevitable and secularization therefore plausible.

Could you give some examples of how that works?

a. The largely secular state long predates “secu-

larists” whose main role is generally to articulate what everyone else has intuitively grasped long before. One of the greatest unintended consequences is the rise of toleration. Most Protestant sects (the Quakers are the exception) were not MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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initially in favor of toleration. They split from national churches because the state church was not pure enough to justify being imposed on everyone. They initially wanted to do the imposing themselves (consider the New England Puritans!). Only when they failed to win over enough people did they start to think that toleration might just be to their advantage. And gradually they persuaded themselves that it was also virtuous. When urbanization and industrialization created an obvious need for better education and social welfare, the British state initially wanted to channel tax funding through the state churches; but that did not work because the state churches faced too much opposition from Presbyterians, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists, and so forth. So the state gradually had to make secular provision. That is, the rise of secular provision was a consequence, not of aggressive secularism, but of the internal divisions of the churches.

For another example consider the U.S. Constitution. If the thirteen colonies had all had the same established church, the United States could have had a state church. It was the fact of religious diversity and the fears of the minority sects that created neutrality, not the campaigns of secularists.

One of the compelling arguments in your book is that even the type of religion or spirituality that remains personally engaging in the U.S., for example, is privatized and subjectivized. Could you explain how this fits, rather than counts against, the Secularization Paradigm?

a. Privatized and subjectivized religion is evi-

dence of secularization. In the Christian West, traditionally religious people supposed that there was one God and it was our job to obey him, and that usually meant trying to impose our vision on everybody else. We no longer expect that everyone will worship the same God in the same way, and we lack the certainty and power to impose our views on others. In turn, we fail to pass on what faith we have intact to our children. Instead, we encourage them to think for themselves. We solve the problem of competing visions by allowing that apparently contradictory things can all

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somehow be “true.” There is what is true for you and what is true for me. That sort of religion is inherently weaker than the traditional kind because there is no longer a strong psychological dynamic to ensure our children share our perspective.

Some have attributed decline in church attendance in Western countries to “believing without belonging.” What do you make of that interpretation?

a. “Believing without belonging” is a fairy story

church people tell themselves so they don’t get too depressed. There is no evidence for it. We have good longitudinal measures of religious activity, popularity of religious beliefs, and sense of religious identity. The three measures start from different heights: claiming a religious identity is more common than holding some religious beliefs, which in turn is more common than engaging in religious activities. But the crucial point is that all three measures decline pretty much in tandem.

“FOR ANOTHER EXAMPLE CONSIDER THE U.S. CONSTITUTION. IF THE THIRTEEN COLONIES HAD ALL HAD THE SAME ESTABLISHED CHURCH, THE UNITED STATES COULD HAVE HAD A STATE CHURCH. IT WAS THE FACT OF RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY AND THE FEARS OF THE MINORITY SECTS THAT CREATED NEUTRALITY, NOT THE CAMPAIGNS OF SECULARISTS.”

Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism are growing in many parts of the developing world. How can the Secularization Paradigm account for this?

a. The secularization thesis argues that a series

of specific changes (not the passage of time) undermines religion. Large parts of the world are not yet experiencing those changes. So why expect those societies to secularize? For example, religious diversity only weakens commitment when it is underpinned by an essentially egalitarian ethos that puts a high premium on personal liberty. Societies have to first work through the alternative of trying to re-impose a single religious culture through extermination, expulsion, and forced conversion. In Europe, we tried that for two centuries before we gave it up. Actually, far from being a surprise, the shift of many cultures from an organic communal Catholicism to an individualistic Protestantism is largely a repeat of what happened in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are many parallels between the current appeal of Pentecostalism in Latin America and the appeal of Methodism in England in the nineteenth century.

Is it really secularization that we’re seeing across Europe, or the march of militant Islam through the vacant ruins of Christendom?

a. Your question does not actually pose compet-

ing alternatives. The ruination of Christendom is what we mean by secularization. And the suggestion that we are being overrun by jihadists is the paranoid fantasy of a few right-wing newspapers and puppet political parties. Muslims are a very small part of the population of most European societies, and militants are a very small part of the Muslim population. They are easily outnumbered by liberal and “secular,” or “heritage,” Muslims. The Muslim influx has made religion more controversial because some Muslims wish their faith to enjoy the public presence and prestige it had in their home country, but the net effect has been to make Europe even more secular. For example, the U.K. had blasphemy laws that had long fallen into disuse (the last Scottish case was in the 1830s), but we left them on the

“RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY ONLY WEAKENS COMMITMENT WHEN IT IS UNDERPINNED BY AN ESSENTIALLY EGALITARIAN ETHOS THAT PUTS A HIGH PREMIUM ON PERSONAL LIBERTY.” statute book rather than bother to argue about their repeal. When Muslims claimed that parity required that Islam also be protected against insult, we leveled the playing field by repealing the blasphemy laws.

From a sociological perspective, what would have to happen if secularization were to be reversed?

a.

I am not sure I understand this question.

If you mean, what would we make of the U.K. or France becoming more religious, then the answer would depend on what changes brought that about. If religion became more popular while the social forces that we believe weakened it were still in play, then that would suggest the SP was mistaken. If some of the causal secularizing forces changed, that would just tell us that the social world is understandable but not (in the physics sense) predictable. If you mean whether or not secularization can be reversed, then I would have to say it is as unlikely as the reversal of the slow road to gender or racial equality. Precisely because we now lay such store by personal liberty, I cannot see the degree of religious diversity being reduced, I cannot see state imposition of religious uniformity being accepted, and I cannot see economic rationality giving way to religious precepts.

Show me the advanced industrial economy that will shut down continuous production machines to respect the Sabbath, or the democratic polity that will deny the vote to heretics!

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THE

SECULARIZATION THESIS

by MICHAEL S. HORTON

illustrations by JESSE LEFKOWITZ

From the beginning of the world there has been no region, no city, in short, no household that could do without religion.‌At the same time, I do not say, as Cicero did, that errors disappear with the lapse of time, and that religion grows and becomes better each day.

1

– J O H N C A LV I N

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INTRODUCING THE SECULARIZATION THESIS

Y

OUR CHILDREN are less likely to

be committed to Christian faith and practice than you are. In broad terms, that’s the secularization thesis. Especially for those who take their faith seriously, there is hardly an academic debate with more bearing on our practical lives.

In conservative circles, secularization usually conjures the image of a cabal of cultural elites, moving stealthily between New York, Washington, and Hollywood to drive religion out of public life. The enemy is obvious and, more importantly, external.

According to the secularization thesis (hereafter ST), secularization is a lot more complicated, subtle, and unintentional. In fact, we aren’t passive victims but part of the process in all sorts of ways every day.

Before summarizing the ST, it’s important to be precise out of the gate about what it’s not saying.

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First, secularization shouldn’t be equated with secularism: the former is a process, the latter an ideology.

The ST doesn’t say what should happen. Nor does it see secularization as the triumph of adult reason over childhood faith.

Second, the ST does not say that in the SECULARIZATION THESIS=/ future religion will ➨ Secularism eventually die out, ➨ The Disappearance of as secularists might Religion argue. People will still follow certain beliefs and practices in various religious communities. But it won’t have the same level of public significance in the long term, and as the current of secularization gains strength it will be more difficult to swim against it.

“ONE KEY TO SECULARIZATION IS MODERNIZATION…. LIKE MARY'S LITTLE LAMB, WHEREVER MODERNIZATION IS AT WORK, SECULARIZATION IS SURE TO GO.”

DEF IN I NG THE SECU L AR I ZAT I O N TH E S IS (ST ) The ST is relatively simple, though the process is complex: As societies modernize, they become less religious. This secularization is both external (a gradual fading of a particular religion from the public square) and internal (a gradual transformation and accommodation of traditional religions themselves).

One key to secularization is modernization: they go hand in hand. According to sociologist Peter Berger’s widely invoked definition, modernization “consists of the growth and diffusion of a set of institutions rooted in the transformation of the economy by means of technology.” 2 There is no “modern society,” but “only societies that are more or less advanced on the continuum of modernization.”3 Like Mary’s little lamb, wherever modernization is at work, secularization is sure to go. This is why some Anabaptist communities still shun modern conveniences. More obviously (and, of course, violently), Islamists are adamantly opposed to the expansion of Western patterns—not only liberal

SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION INTERNAL SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION = ➨ The Transformation of Religion

➨ The Accommodation of Religion

EXTERNAL SECULARIZATION OF RELIGION = ➨ The Displacement of Religion

➨ The Decline of the Public Significance Over the Long Term

democracy, but also the visible signs of participation in the global economy. The 2012 film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen offers a vignette of this larger resistance.

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WHAT IS MODERNIZATION ?

Among the many factors, sociologists often include the following:

THE GROWTH OF LITERACY AND UNIVERSAL EDUCATION

Apparently, God was even a fungible product, according to American philosopher William James, who said that the truth of a religion lies in “its cash-value in experiential terms.” As Karl Marx quipped, under the conditions of modernity, “all that is solid melts into the air.” There is no truth, just a supermarket of goods

This brings greater empowerment of individuals, liber-

and services that the self can purchase for its private

ating them from inherited hierarchies, but it also tends

pleasure.

to separate the individual from the community. The result is not only emancipation in terms of social and economic mobility (additional factors in moderniza-

SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION

tion), but also the disruption of local cultures and the

The impact of modernization is virtually synonymous

isolation and loneliness of individuals. This creates

with the fragmentation that we experience personally

a widespread culture of rootlessness and vagrancy.

and culturally. Institutions that used to provide coher-

Such anonymity allows you to “reinvent” yourself with-

ence and that depended heavily upon religion—such

out accountability to family, church, and neighbors,

as welfare, education, and local community groups—

but it also takes away those structures that made you

are undermined and then transformed. Reality is

a part of a particular community.

carved up into semi-autonomous spheres that rarely

THE GROWING RATIONALIZATION OF THOUGHT AND BEHAVIOR

interest. New and more specialized niche institutions then arise in the wake of social fragmentation. The Reformation sought to distinguish different spheres— not only between church and state, but in other fields.

As we seek to explain life processes more carefully

However, in modernization these fields drift apart, no

(sometimes displacing religious explanations of life),

longer finding their ultimate unity in God.

more of life issues are reduced to technical problems with technical solutions. Questions of ultimate significance such as “What is the chief end of man?” are

SOCIETALIZATION

reduced to proximate questions of means, “How can

Our lives together are increasingly organized not

I be happy?” This is sometimes called instrumental or

locally but “societally,” such as through “massive,

calculative reasoning; in other words, a kind of cul-

impersonal bureaucracies, and the development of

tural and individual reasoning that focuses on how to

anonymous urban agglomerations.” Religion, which

achieve your goals, but not whether your goals are

historically established local life, becomes less and

worth pursuing. Reasoning “gets things done,” but

less relevant to the anonymous, impersonal, and

imposes no values. The result is a world of increas-

industrialized public domain, and so is displaced to

ing efficiency coupled with value pluralism, with every

the realm of “privatized, individual experience.” In this

conceivable end competing for our loyalty.

setting, democracy becomes not just a political ideal, but an all-encompassing worldview, just as capitalism

ECONOMIC COMMODIFICATION Rationalized thought treats everything as an exchangeable commodity, thus reality is “commodified.” Whatever can’t be counted, weighed, and priced isn’t valuable—in fact, it might not even exist. “Value” is reduced to the economic value of goods and services.

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fills the whole horizon, including religious enterprise.

QUOTATIONS ARE FROM ROY WALLIS AND STEVE BRUCE, “SECULARIZATION: THE ORTHODOX MODEL,” IN RELIGION AND MODERNIZATION: SOCIOLOGISTS AND HISTORIANS DEBATE THE SECULARIZATION THESIS, ED. STEVE BRUCE (OXFORD: CLARENDON PRESS, 1992).

THE RISE AND FALL OF RELIGION? THE DEBATE

T

HERE HAS BEEN a lively debate

about the secularization of religion over the last twenty-five years. In the late 1980s, sociologist Peter Berger announced that he no longer believed the secularization thesis, though he had once been a leading proponent of the view.

It may work for Europe, he supposed, but it hardly explains the explosion of radical Islam around the world (even in Europe itself ) or of fundamentalist and Pentecostal forms of Christianity in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and evangelical megachurches and political influence in America. Others have joined Berger, such as Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark.

People still go to church—just different ones.

Using his South Dakota hometown as an example,

Stark observes that the old mainline churches in the center of town are virtually empty, but the Assemblies of God folks who started in a strip mall are now the megachurch near the freeway. In fact, Stark has argued that instead of destroying religion, competition in the marketplace actually energizes it. All boats rise when free enterprise is at work, even in religion.

Yet the debate seems to have only just begun.

Along with Mark Chaves, N. J. Demerath, and others, University of Aberdeen sociologist Steve Bruce has mounted an impressive case for the ST in the face of recent objections. These scholars argue that you can’t just look at drop-out numbers to detect secularization. Often in different ways, with radically different agendas, liberal and conservative MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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FOR FURTHER READING AGAINST THE SECULARIZATION THESIS

churches themselves are carriers of modernization and therefore secularization. They don’t impede the transition from God-centered to human-centered, public claims to private experience, theology to therapy, and truth to technique. In fact, they typically foster it.

DE FE NDI NG T HE SE CU LA RI Z AT I ON THE SI S: ST EVE BRUCE

The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success RODNEY STARK Random House, 2007

MODERATELY CRITICAL OF THE SECULARIZATION THESIS Public Religions in the Modern World JOSE CASSANOVA University of Chicago Press, U 1994

DEFENDING THE SECULARIZATION THESIS Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory STEVE BRUCE Oxford University Press, 2013

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Although this debate has been held primarily among academics, and many evangelical scholars take the side of Peter Berger against the secularization thesis, we argue that there are important aspects of the ST that help explain American religious experience.

In his impressive book Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory, Steve Bruce makes a solid case for the secularization of religion thesis.

Marshaling piles of data, he distinguishes carefully between secularist polemics arguing for a deliberate program against religion on the one hand and secularization as a mostly inadvertent process on the other. Bruce’s case is not to argue for or against the merits of secularization, but simply to document, as a sociologist, the process and consequences of secularization in modern culture.

Anticipating the usual objections, Bruce begins by identifying the typical factors of secularization: a gradual weakening of social power and difficulty in socializing children in the faith. Without state support and the influx of immigrants who practice their religion freely, even a residual social consensus privileging one religion begins to fade. Without the ambient affirmation of a particular religion in public, the individual is left to the support of mediating institutions—family, church, school, and the wider subculture of adherents. Beliefs and practices once considered normal are now considered odd and perhaps even antisocial. Bruce says, “As religion becomes increasingly a matter of free choice, it becomes harder to maintain boundaries.”

This encourages “first relativism—all roads lead to God—and then indifference as it becomes harder to persuade people that there is special merit in any particular road” (Bruce, 2–3). He shares Thomas Luckmann’s view that “religion does not disappear; rather, it is transformed into the private codes of ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-realisation’ in an invisible or private form of religion” (Bruce, 24).

“THOSE FOR WHOM PRIVATE THERAPY IS THE DOMINANT RELIGIOUS MOTIVE WILL NOT LIKELY TRANSMIT A BODY OF DOCTRINE AND TRADITIONAL PRACTICES TO THEIR CHILDREN. THE BUBBLE WILL BURST.” Internal secularization results, and you see this in both mainline and evangelical churches, especially in their efforts to be relevant. Bruce writes: “In brief, the major churches have responded to the liberalization of the general environment by themselves becoming more liberal in doctrine and more ecumenical in inter-church relations.”

Framing religion—in fact, selling it—in terms of consumers picking and choosing what they find valuable is to embrace secularization. In mainline churches, it is often among the clergy that one finds a lack of conviction in the specific articles of the Apostle’s Creed. Even where the creed is still affirmed, “the basic Christian ideas have been internalized and psychologized,” Bruce says.

“Evil and sin have been turned into alienation and unhappiness. The vengeful God has been replaced

by Christ the inspiring Big Brother or Christ the therapist. The purpose of religion is no longer to glorify God: it is to help find peace of mind and personal satisfaction” (Bruce, 13).

REVIVA L S: ENERG I ZI NG SE CU L ARIZ AT IO N Even movements that are hailed by some as revivals can be seen to facilitate rather than interrupt

the secularization process. Bruce says, “Although the charismatic movement that influenced Protestant churches in the 1970s is often seen as a conservative reaction to liberalizing trends, the reality is rather different.” Although the emphasis on miracles “might seem like a significant injection of supernaturalism,” he argues, “it eroded the doctrinal orthodoxy of conservative Protestant sects” and “recruited primarily from older denominations and sects rather than from the unchurched.”

In fact, “much of their appeal lay in the way they disguised the extent of change with some old language. Far from being a cure for the liberalization of the faith, they made the change easier by providing easy steps away from the old orthodoxies” (Bruce, 14).

One of the points Bruce emphasizes is that this process is often carried forward by unintended consequences. It is not the case that secularists are winning arguments and court cases, or even that people prefer its dogmas to Christian ones.

Rather, it is a slow process of generational change in which people gradually lose interest in things that mattered to their parents and in which the possibilities for belief and practice expand while the salience of any of those beliefs and practices declines.…The best way I can convey the change from the religious to the secular is to use the metaphor of an abandoned garden in the countryside. Without constant pruning, selective breeding, and weeding, the garden loses its distinctive character, as it is overtaken by the greater variety of plant species in the surrounding wilderness. (Bruce, 19) So citing examples of outbreaks of religious enthusiasm is not enough to refute the ST. Where these resurgences appear, they are either hostile to modernization (thereby slowing its general acceptance) or are successful precisely by accommodating internal secularization. Wherever modernization is lagging, secularization is lagging as well. So the rising enthusiasm in close-knit tribal territories of Pakistan, where children are isolated in madrassas from Western influences, doesn’t count against the ST (Bruce, 26). Modernization is real, it is global, and wherever it becomes entrenched, secularization is inevitable. Is it more difficult to be a MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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convinced and practicing Christian today than it was even a generation ago? If your answer is yes, then you’re basically in agreement with the ST. THE PR I VATE WO R L D OF RE L I G I O U S E XP E RIE NC E Under these conditions, believers themselves begin to compartmentalize their lives. There have always been hypocrites and heretics, but in the medieval worldview (and in Islamist communities today) there is no corner of life where the heavenly world doesn’t somehow affect daily affairs. Under the terms of modernization, however, we agree to leave our private convictions at the checkpoint before entering the public square. There are public beliefs that are hammered out through rational debate and consensus. We use the same calculative reason when we go to work, pick up our prescriptions, and make preparations for a hurricane that the meteorologists have calculated for our region.

But then on Sunday or in private devotions we shift subconsciously to a different worldview.

The compartmentalization of “doctrine” and

“life” and then of “spirituality” and “the real world” deepens into a yawning chasm. We struggle with the contradiction and sometimes feel anxiously pressed to choose between a private but irrational faith and a public but utterly naturalistic reason.

“With compartmentalization comes privatization: the sense that the reach of religion is shortened to just those who accept the teachings of this or that faith” (Bruce, 38).

As Thomas Luckmann explains, individual autonomy is enshrined in the idea of a consumer. Religion is private and therefore one may buy whatever product one finds useful.4 Even when you can point to encouraging “sales figures” as an evangelist, you’ve succeeded at the cost of translating objective truth-claims centered on God into subjective purchases centered on the self. Those for whom private therapy is the dominant religious motive will not likely transmit a body of doctrine and traditional practices to their children.

The bubble will burst. “Relativism debilitates faith by removing the best reason to ensure one’s children are socialized in the faith. If all faiths (and none) offer a road to God, if there is no hell to which heretics get sent, then there is no need to ensure the transmission of orthodoxy” (Bruce, 47–48).

“THE SECULARIZATION PARADIGM HAS NO ARGUMENT WITH THE CLAIM THAT THERE HAS BEEN AN INCREASE IN INDIVIDUALISTIC THIS-WORLDLY RELIGION....

INDEED, THE SHIFT FROM AUTHORITARIAN DOGMATIC RELIGION PREDICATED ON AN EXTERNAL CREATOR TO INDIVIDUALISTIC FORMS OF RELIGION IS A CENTRAL PART OF THE SECULARIZATION THESIS.” 34

THE CASE FOR THE TRANSFORMATION OF RELIGION

C

RITICS BELIEVE that proponents

of the secularization thesis interpret global religious movements through the narrow lens of European secularization. To be sure, Europe is secularized. They will argue, however, that this pattern doesn’t work for the United States, much less for the global south, where conservative—even radical—forms of Islam and Christianity are bursting at the seams. But by debating too narrowly the question of the disappearance of religion, critics of the secularization thesis fail to see the transformation of religion that is at the heart of the process of secularization.

Steve Bruce wonders if critics have even understood the trend line of European secularization. It’s not a free fall that occurred from the 1960s, but part

of a longer trajectory of displacement. In his book, Bruce offers overwhelming data showing that even where revivals—especially in the U.K.—have given a momentary spike in church attendance and social piety, the aftermath is usually lower church involvement than had been true before the revival. Critics of the ST are looking at the spikes—including bursts of religious enthusiasm in various parts of the world today, instead of the longer trend lines whereupon after each revival Anglican, Methodist, and Baptist churches declined in membership. This suggests a radical transformation and displacement of religion, not its disappearance.

Yet, once again, Bruce doesn’t rest everything on church drop-out numbers. Even where in revivalist religion “business is booming,” the very fact that it MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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thinks and acts like a business is evidence of internal secularization.

SPIRI T UA L I T Y VS. RE L IG IO N? What then about the apparent popularity of New Age or other occult spiritualties? For the most part, this impression is anecdotal, says Bruce. An impressive cadre of celebrity endorsers is hardly a mass movement. Besides, when looking at the data, New Agers are a terrific example of secularization.

First, most were raised in fairly traditional religious backgrounds. Statistically, there isn’t a sudden rush of atheists and agnostics who are reading Deepak Chopra or signing up for Kabbalah courses.

It’s simply a stage along the exodus from more traditional religious communities; it’s “fuzzy fidelity.”

Bruce writes, “As Voas concludes: ‘Fuzzy fidelity is not a new kind of religion, or a proxy for as yet unfocused spiritual seeking; it is a staging post on the road from religious to secular hegemony’” (Bruce, 22). In other words, movements like this consist not of serious adherents, but of consumers who are on their way out of traditional religions. (Oprah Winfrey was reared in the Missionary Baptist Church and was dubbed “the preacher girl.” Shirley MacLaine’s parents were Southern Baptist missionaries.)

Furthermore, they do not proselytize, and they do not pass their beliefs (utterly unique to each sovereign chooser) to their children. They do not reproduce.

“The secularization paradigm has no argument with the claim that there has been an increase in individualistic this-worldly religion,” says Bruce.

“Indeed, the shift from authoritarian dogmatic religion predicated on an external Creator to individualistic forms of religion is a central part of the secularization thesis” (Bruce, 103). If those reared in more traditional religions are becoming New Agers, then that’s exactly what the ST expects.

“While the sovereign consumerism of the New Age may be extreme, it is part of a general trend in the religious culture of the Western world” (Bruce, 155).

Nor is Bruce baffled by the evidence of evangelical vitality in the United States. First, the triumph of secularization itself often provokes futile rebellions among those who feel threatened. But even in terms of numbers, there simply has been no mass conversion of Episcopalians to Southern Baptists, or agnostics joining the ranks of the born again.

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Rather, evangelicals—like most subcultures in modernized societies—have become a special interest group, like a trade union or ethnic minority. As the U.S. economic base has shifted from urban northern centers to the Sun Belt, the evangelical subculture has spawned schools, colleges, and mass media. Overall, however, the national indicators of religious conviction are on the decline. Second, evangelical political efforts—not theology—brought considerable media attention to the movement.

Even then, the Christian Right failed to win many, if any, of its major policy concerns (Bruce, 157–58).

And, one might add, recent surveys indicate that the next generation of evangelical voters is far more affirming of gay marriage, abortion rights, and other nemeses of their parents’ generation.

S E CU LA RI Z AT I ON A ND T HE CHRI ST I AN LI FE Even more telling, though, is the evidence of this internal secularization that the last point highlights.

“In 1996, Bryan Wilson drew a contrast that has turned out to be remarkably accurate. He suggested that, while Europeans secularized by abandoning the churches, Americans secularized their churches.” The statistics demonstrate that American Christians have become increasingly vague about their beliefs or even reject various orthodox doctrines (Bruce, 160). Bruce agrees with sociologist Wilson’s conclusion that secularization has taken two forms: “In Europe, the churches became less popular; in the United States, the churches became less religious” (Bruce, 156).

According to Bruce, “The simplest way of describing the changes in content of much American religion is to say that the supernatural has been diminished and it has been psychologized or subjectivized.” Evangelicals criticized liberals like Harry

“IN EUROPE, THE CHURCHES BECAME LESS POPULAR; IN THE UNITED STATES, THE CHURCHES BECAME LESS RELIGIOUS.”

Emerson Fosdick in the 1930s and Norman Vincent Peale through the 1930s and ’50s for doing this, but Peale’s understudy, Robert Schuller, was widely embraced as an evangelical. Instead of God’s wrath against human sin, the real human problem according to Fosdick was that “‘multitudes of people are living not bad but frittered lives—split, scattered, uncoordinated.’ The solution was a religion that would ‘furnish an inward spiritual dynamic for radiant and triumphant living.’”5 “Conservatives had been bitterly critical of liberals for turning salvation…into this-worldly personal therapy. Yet, two generations later, evangelicals were rewriting the gospel in the same way” (Bruce, 163). So even the arguments of Christian conservatives are framed in the way once championed by liberals. Wade Clark Roof notes that “the religious stance today is more internal than external, more individual than institutional, more experiential than cerebral, more private than public” (Bruce, 165–66).

The same changes are evident in behavioral codes.

Bruce notes that evangelicals were known for strict (some would say legalistic) behavioral codes. In the 1950s nearly all evangelicals said that dancing and alcohol were “wrong all the time.” He writes, “In 2003, almost half of born-again Christians thought that ‘living with someone of the opposite sex without being married’ was morally acceptable.” After all, objective norms have been transformed into private therapies. Even conservatives defend traditional values now with liberal (secular) assumptions.

Divorce is wrong not because God forbids it, but because it is “socially dysfunctional.” “Legal battles over abortion are fought on the entirely secular principle that abortion infringes on the universal right to life” (Bruce, 171). While most favor prayer in public schools, “Only 12 percent of evangelicals thought that such prayers should be specifically Christian.”6 Especially in many of the churches that are booming, internal secularization is particularly evident as the message is psychologized and subjectivized. In the 1980s, Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham captured national headlines for evangelicals. More recently, one thinks of Joel Osteen and Rob Bell. This is the secularization paradigm.

Yet even in terms of drop-out rates favored by critics, the ST seems to be increasingly confirmed. After Bruce’s book was published, a 2012 Pew Religion Survey showed that the number of

“UNLESS WE CAN IMAGINE A REVERSAL OF THE INCREASING CULTURAL AUTONOMY OF THE INDIVIDUAL, SECULARIZATION MUST BE SEEN AS IRREVERSIBLE.” Americans who check the box “None” for religion has grown over the last five years from 15 percent to just under 20 percent even though “three-fourths of unaffiliated adults were raised with some affiliation (74%).”7 And while whole ministries were geared toward “seekers” among the Boomer generation, 88 percent of the religiously unaffiliated now say they’re not even looking. This demographic is growing especially among the younger generations who have not even been part of a church. It’s not that they have moved out of a particular church or denomination; they don’t identify with any religion. “In 2007 60% of those who said they seldom or never attend religious services nevertheless described themselves as belonging to a particular religious tradition.” In 2010, it was 50 percent— “a 10-point drop in five years.” Just what the ST predicts.

TH E BI G QU E ST I ON Can secularization be reversed? “There is no sign that the people of the West are willing to give up their autonomy,” says Bruce. Wherever “the individual asserts the rights of the sovereign autonomous consumer,” so too will secularization. The idea that a good war or a national disaster will turn us around is nonsense. “Britain experienced two catastrophic wars and an intervening depression without a religious revival” (Bruce, 55). There may be occasional “retarding tendencies” along the way. “But, unless we can imagine a reversal of the increasing cultural autonomy of the individual, secularization must be seen as irreversible” (Bruce, 56).

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MAKING SENSE OF THE MODERN WORLD

M

Y G OA L H E R E has been simply to summarize what seems to me to be a fairly compelling thesis with important practical implications for all of us. Our response to secularization depends to a large extent on what we think it is in the first place. I’ll conclude with two brief responses.

SHA R I NG THE B L AM E First, if the ST is correct, then we have to stop thinking that we’re simply a passive victim of a highly funded cultural elite and realize that we ourselves—our families, churches, schools, and subculture—are not only centers of resistance but also carriers of secularization. We need to become more

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self-critical—and critical of aspects of modernization that we have not only taken for granted but even treated as part and parcel of traditional Christianity.

Lionizing or demonizing is the lazy option.

Capitalism, democracy, and technology can’t be embraced or rejected wholesale. By friends, Christianity is often praised as the force behind modernization.8 By foes, it is seen as either the enemy of freedom or the source of modernization’s worst features. Christians have theological reasons to resist simplistic and reductionistic answers.

Christianity has influenced, and has been influenced by, all sorts of trends that we like and dislike. The church has persecuted and liberated. The deepest instincts of the New Testament draw us to defend religious liberty, but also to resist a naturalistic worldview that enshrines human autonomy.

“THE SECULARIZATION THESIS HELPS US LET GO OF OUR NEARLY IDOLATROUS OBSESSION WITH AMERICA IN PARTICULAR AND WITH THE WEST IN GENERAL, AS SOMETHING THAT BELONGS TO US THAT WE MUST WIN BACK BY ANOTHER REVIVAL, GREAT AWAKENING, OR POLITICAL CRUSADE. IT CAN CAUSE ANXIETY, BUT IT CAN ALSO HELP RELIEVE IT, BY LETTING US FOCUS FINALLY ON OUR LORD’S COMMISSION TO HIS APOSTLES TO PREACH THE GOSPEL, BAPTIZE, AND TEACH EVERYTHING HE COMMANDED.”

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WHY IT MATTERS? THE CHALLENGES WE FACE The secularization of religion that occurs in response to modernization may be briefly summarized with the following: (1) Privatization, (2) Pluralization, (3) Relativization, and (4) Psychologization. These explain why, in modern societies, we can expect children to be less religious than their parents.

1. PRIVATIZATION

4. PSYCHOLOGIZATION

Religion becomes more privatized—especially without

At last, religion is reduced to a form of personal

the reinforcement of widely shared cultural practices

therapy, as objective claims are psychologized into

(such as the rhythm of holy days, festivals, and Sunday

subjective experience. “God” becomes equivalent

observances) and public policy (such as state support

to a “source of inner empowerment,” and the Bible’s

for a particular church, anti-blasphemy laws, and reli-

historical plotline of creation, fall, redemption, and

gious instruction in schools).

2. PLURALIZATION

consummation is turned into an indi-

PRIVATIZATION

vidualistic and inner striving, from an

PLURALIZATION

According to this story, we came from

Privatization leads to pluralization,

autonomous selfhood to dysfunction to recovery and self-enlightenment.

especially as new immigrants arrive with varied religious backgrounds.

Religious pluralism, of course, is a fact—especially in Europe and in North

in between we can make something

America. Religious freedom is a right.

of ourselves. To the extent that we see

However, these two facets of pluralism are often confused in people’s minds

RELATIVIZATION

equally true.

3. RELATIVIZATION

the basic trajectory of this process in evangelical circles today as well, we should not be surprised to discover

with the idea that all religious paths are

PSYCHOLOGIZATION

in the latest statistics that the sharpest rise among those who do not claim any religious affiliation is among evangelical as well as mainline Protestants.

This leads typically to the relativization of truth-claims as those practicing a particular religion are

Accommodating ourselves to the

reluctant to defend their beliefs as true for everybody

culture of modernity, we can no longer use the old

and increasingly commend their private commitments

growth-versus-decline argument as an anti-mainline

merely as personally useful and meaningful.

As those who live in, but are no longer defined by, this passing age, Christians of all people should be suspicious of every principality and power that claims ultimate allegiance. Yet as those who know that the age to come has not yet been consummated by the return of Christ, and that we ourselves remain simultaneously justified and sinful, we can find no pure alternative to modernization that could compensate for Christ’s fully realized kingdom.

The ST helps us let go of our nearly idolatrous obsession with America in particular and with

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nowhere and are going nowhere, but

polemic.

the West in general, as something that belongs to us that we must win back by another revival, great awakening, or political crusade. It can cause anxiety, but it can also help relieve it, by letting us focus finally on our Lord’s commission to his apostles to preach the gospel, baptize, and teach everything he commanded. The increasing secularization of the kind of society we have right now seems inevitable—in purely natural terms—but the growth of Christ’s kingdom has the promise of a risen Lord and the powerful presence of his Word and Spirit.

The early Christians didn’t have an empire to “win back.” They knew they were strangers and aliens sent to proclaim good news to the captives to the ends of the earth. They gathered—even secretly when necessary—“for the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42). They proclaimed God’s Word as true for all people everywhere. They testified to the coming judgment, with Jesus Christ as the only way to the Father. Dubbed “enemies of humanity,” they nevertheless loved their neighbors. And they evangelized, baptized, catechized, communed, and cared for the spiritual and temporal needs of the saints. They were always in danger either of being persecuted or being absorbed into the cultus of Roman paganism.

But Caesar was too late, and even if he had been on time, he was never the lord of history. Jesus already reversed the inevitable process of our fallen world to death and hell. It is precisely this news that we proclaim to the world and in the light of this news that we live hopeful and secure lives in the world each day. It is on this basis that we leave off trying to turn back the secularizing forces of modernity in our culture and simply teach the faith to our children, share in the communion of saints, and love and serve our neighbors each day.

THE L I M I TS O F TH E SECU L AR I ZATI O N TH E S IS Second, even if the ST is correct, it is—like all other natural explanations—limited in its predictive power. It can only tell us what normally happens under certain conditions. A doctor can tell you what is likely to happen given various factors of genes, diet, habits, and exercise. Apart from Christ’s resurrection from the dead, there is no evidence in this world that we will be raised—and much in our present condition to count against that hope. Astrophysicists can predict with remarkable mathematical precision the likelihood that our expanding universe will collapse in on itself at some point in the future. Using mathematical formulas, Las Vegas bookies can predict with stupefying accuracy the outcome of the World Series.

Sophisticated methods of calculative analysis are not simply entertaining; they are often crucial

“WE OURSELVES, OUR FAMILIES, CHURCHES, SCHOOLS, AND SUBCULTURE ARE NOT ONLY CENTERS OF RESISTANCE BUT ALSO CARRIERS OF SECULARIZATION.” and even life-saving. But they only cover the natural explanations—how things ordinarily go, things being what they are. They can’t account for the sudden recovery from cancer that defies the odds, the second coming of Christ, or the career of Babe Ruth.

There is no way of predicting the emergence of the church from a nucleus of eleven terrified followers of a crucified Jew whose leader had denied—to a little girl—even knowing Jesus. And, given its history ever since, there is no way of explaining the existence of the church today, much less its spread to the ends of the earth, in natural terms. It’s a miracle. Repentance and faith are gifts. We are born again from above. Given the conditions of modernization, secularization will continue as one of the many regimes of this fading age. Yet it’s the one who was raised from the dead, against all odds, who has the last word: “I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”

Michael S. Horton is executive editor of Modern Reformation.

1 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1.3.1, 3.

2 P. L. Berger, B. Berger, and H. Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), 15.

3 Steve Bruce, Secularization: In Defence of an Unfashionable Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 26. Hereafter “Bruce” followed by page number.

4 Bruce, 38, referring to T. Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (NY: Macmillan, 1967), 98–99.

5 Bruce, 161. See also his book, Pray TV: Televangelism in America (London: Routledge, 1990), 84.

6 Bruce, 172, citing Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 2009.

7 I explore these findings in a post at http://www.whitehorseinn.org/ blog/?s=flying+nones.

8 Many examples could be cited from evangelical leaders over recent decades, but this view also has academic supporters like Rodney Stark. See especially his work, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (New York: Random House, 2007).

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LOSING OUR KIDS

TO SECULARISM ECULARISM

by SHANE ROSENTHAL

I

magine for a moment that a school in your neighborhood organizes a field trip for one hundred of its students to a nearby zoo and that during this trip a number of large animals escape and end up trampling sixty children. Not only would this become a national news story, but more importantly, it would be a personal tragedy for many of the families in your community.

No doubt there would be countless investigations on how such a thing could have happened, and the zoo would likely be temporarily, if not permanently, shut down. As horrific as all this sounds, there is something worse happening in our own churches, and few are sounding the alarm.

In Matthew 10:28 Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.” An obvious implication of this verse is that we should be more concerned with the state of our souls than with mere bodily existence. Yet according to most statistics, around 60 percent of those who grow up in American churches end up dropping out sometime after high school.1 The majority of those who remain end up defining the faith as a kind of therapeutic or moral system.2 So why aren’t Christians talking about this crisis? Why aren’t we demanding answers from our church leaders about this critical issue, and why do most of us appear to be unconcerned about it ourselves?

I submit that this is all rooted in the fact that we don’t actually believe Jesus’ point about the special care and attention we are to give to the state of our souls. Watch us for a week or two and you’ll see us practically bubble-wrap our children before we let them get on a bicycle or scooter, and we start to freak out if our kids’ favorite cereal has too much gluten or high fructose corn syrup. Yet when it comes to spiritual things, we generally send our kids out unprotected; we’re generally unconcerned about their spiritual diet. Not only are they leaving our homes biblically illiterate, but they hardly know

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how to frame a sentence in which the concepts of truth and falsehood have much relevance.

In short, our problem is a theological one. We believe that the most important thing is right now, not eternity; this world, not the next; the body, not the soul. Granted, it’s a controversial thesis, but how else are we to explain the incredible success of books like Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now? How else are we to explain the ever-increasing shelf space devoted to “Christian Living,” or the explosive growth of Christian romance and Amish fiction?

So why do we believe that this world is more important than the next? Why are we more preoccupied with physical than spiritual health? Why are churches more interested in being practical and relevant than faithful or countercultural? The issue boils down to this simple yet disturbing idea: The world is doing a better job at getting its message across than we are. In other words, the “this world is all there is” crowd is more passionate and more effective at evangelism.

I recently experienced this firsthand while recording a number of interviews on a university campus in Southern California. The non-Christian students I talked with at least offered reasons for their beliefs (or lack thereof ). But the one self-identified Christian I interviewed could only speak of her personal experience of faith. When asked how she would respond to a person who argued that the Bible was rooted in mythology, she replied, “Well, I guess I would say that I choose to believe these myths.”

Many students told me that they had abandoned the Christianity of their upbringing based on what they were reading and studying at college. Some would say they lost their faith. I argue that they simply got converted to a different set of beliefs.

Harry Blamires addresses this issue thoughtfully in his book The Secularist Heresy: The Erosion of the Gospel in the Twentieth Century. In his preface to the American edition, he reflects on all that

had occurred in the thirty years since he first set out to write this volume. He says, “I could never have anticipated the virulent form which the epidemic of secularization would assume in attacking Christianity, nor the spiritual, intellectual and moral nervelessness that would paralyze many supposed leaders of Christian thought.” But, he concludes, the end result is that today’s churchgoer “is nowadays unlikely to come away from church wondering: Has that sermon got any connection with the secular world outside the church? He is more likely to come away asking: Has that sermon got any connection with anything other than the secular world? Has it led my thoughts where picking up a newspaper or turning on the television could not have led?”3 He wrote these words in 1980. Imagine what he would have penned if he were around to experience a typical worship service at one of our super-relevant big-box megachurches.

The substance of the book was actually written in the early 1950s, and it is during this time that Blamires looks out in the not-too-distant future and sees a day in which the dominating controversy within Christendom will be between those who give full weight to the supernatural reality at the heart of all Christian dogma, practice, and thought, and those who try to convert Christianity into a naturalistic religion by whittling away the reality and comprehensiveness of its supernatural basis. This conflict is already upon us and is pushing into the background controversies which caused deep and bitter strife in previous ages.4 Unfortunately, what Blamires foresaw over a halfcentury ago has actually come to pass, and it’s not merely happening in college classrooms led by naturalistic professors. It’s happening in both conservative and liberal churches alike. The emphasis in conservative circles is on God’s supportive role in the life of the believer, how he can fix marriages, improve child rearing, inspire better financial planning, and so forth. On the other hand, liberal churches tend to emphasize what God (however we define what that means) is doing among us collectively and socially. Left-leaning adherents are often called to join with God in his redemptive plan

for the world by pursuing things such as social justice and environmental responsibility. At the end of the day, conservatives and liberals alike are together obsessed with temporal rather than eternal things. The primary focus is on the body, not the soul, and on the practical benefits of Christianity, not the heart of Christianity itself, which is centered on Christ and his finished work. Blamires then observes: The outrage is being committed daily in our midst, wherever the supposed Christian message is presented without reference to baptism, grace, and regeneration; without reference to Incarnation, Atonement and Redemption...without reference to the Church, the sacraments and the Holy Spirit.

That such an emasculation of the Christian message is possible is a shocking fact. That a ‘Christianity’ can be popularized in which the fundamentals of Christian faith, practice and worship are annihilated, is an appalling testimony to our spiritual apathy and our theological illiteracy….How has this corruption of the Christian Message come about?

All we can say in answer is that the prevailing materialism of popular thought, so diversely represented in the attitudes and evaluations of the man in the streets and his newspapers, has spread its infection so as to contaminate the only authority which brings a cure. The physician is himself infected with the disease.5 This is the battle of our times. The question is not merely, why are kids abandoning our churches?

In most cases, the question is and should be, what compelling reasons are we giving them to stay?

Shane Rosenthal is executive producer of the White Horse Inn radio broadcast and assistant pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in St. Charles, Missouri.

1 See, for example, David Kinnaman, You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…And Rethinking Faith (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2011).

2 See Christian Smith and Melinda L. Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

3 Harry Blamires, The Secularist Heresy: The Erosion of the Gospel in the Twentieth Century (Ann Arbor: Servant Books, 1980), 2–3.

4 Blamires, 65.

5 Blamires, 67–68.

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Feed Your Inner Theology Geek.

VISIT THE STORE. Be sure to check out White Horse Inn’s online store.

In addition to books, you’ll find mp3s, study kits, and videos for sale—everything you need to keep the conversation going offline.

VISIT W H ITEH O R SE IN N.ORG/STORE .

book reviews 48

“True atheism must be that of Nietzsche’s Madman, facing the cold, impersonal brutality of a godless universe where all that is left is the will to power.”

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MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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BOOK REVIEWS

Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

BY TERRY EAGLETON Yale University Press, 2010 200 pages (paperback), $17.50

I

confess to being a fan of Terry Eagleton and to having read almost everything he has ever written. Yes, he is a committed Marxist, even though that particular family of philosophies has lost all credibility; but he always writes with wit and intelligence and is perhaps the only man who can make his readers laugh out loud while discussing Althusser or Habermas. More importantly, he has no time for the lazy relativism of much of the postmodern crowd. His evisceration of the latter in books such as After Theory is awesome to behold. If he has no time for postmodern laziness, he certainly has no patience with the smug confidence of Enlightenment rationalists and liberals. And that is the context for this most stimulating volume.

The one thing that even the most unlettered know about Marx is that he described religion as the opium of the people—in effect, a palliative to keep the lumpen underclasses subdued despite the harshness of life the class system imposed upon them. Thus it might come as a surprise to find Eagleton offering a defense of religion in the face of those two enforcers of the New Atheism, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (or “Ditchkins,” the name Eagleton uses to highlight their basic ideological agreement).

A little background is helpful: as a student, Eagleton was part of the intellectual circles around the left-wing Dominican friar Herbert McCabe. While he later abandoned his Roman Catholic faith, it is clear that he retained affection both for McCabe (who is lavishly praised in the foreword to After Theory) and for the connection between a certain strand of Thomist metaphysics and the possibility of radical political transformation. Further, since the work of Christopher Hill in the 1950s and '60s, Marxists came to see religion as actually a potent revolutionary force. After all, who is more likely to blow

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“EAGLETON ALLOWS THAT MANY OF DITCHKIN’S AESTHETIC AND MORAL CRITICISMS OF RELIGION ARE UNCONTESTABLE, BUT THEN HE GOES ON TO POINT OUT THAT THE KIND OF SECULAR HUMANISM HIS TARGETS ADVOCATE IS ITSELF SUBJECT TO MUCH THE SAME.” up a commercial airplane to make a statement— the radical Islamist or the atheist college student who reads Ditchkins? Both Eagleton’s autobiography and the general trend of Marxist analysis of religion make a book such as this quite a comprehensible phenomenon.

The book consists of four chapters. In “The Scum of the Earth,” Eagleton does a fine job of demonstrating that the God against whom Ditchkins rails is little more than a caricature.

Interestingly enough, as he debunks this God, he demonstrates a more accurate understanding of the divine than many professing Christians.

He attacks sentimentalized views of God’s love and the consistent human ability to remake God in our own image, conforming to our pieties and expectations. Always careful to make it clear that he does not himself believe in this God, he still manages to describe pretty accurately the God of the Bible. He also warns against allowing religion to become a shelter for paranoid fantasies, as human values are squeezed out or degraded by the dynamics of the market. Yes, the Marxism shows through, but what Christian is there who cannot see that the reduction of all relations to

those of money is part and parcel of the destruction of religion in the public square?

In “The Revolution Betrayed,” Eagleton allows that many of Ditchkin’s aesthetic and moral criticisms of religion are uncontestable, but then he goes on to point out that the kind of secular humanism his targets advocate is itself subject to much the same. I suspect American readers will find this chapter the hardest with which to sympathize as Eagleton lambastes American foreign policy.

He makes all of the usual left-wing charges and verges at times on the simplistic. Indeed, the chapter also seems rather repetitive and overblown.

Nevertheless, the general point is well made, even if the specifics are debatable: modern Western liberalism uses the rhetoric of progress and freedom but has often failed to deliver on either and, indeed, has as much blood on its hands as any religious movement.

Further, Eagleton also makes the important point that one cannot emphasize the positives of modernity without also acknowledging the negatives. If postmoderns also often refuse to acknowledge the benefits of modernity (even as they take antibiotics, enjoy clean water, and so forth), so moderns such as Ditchkins need to understand that the science that gave us pediatric care also gave us the Holocaust. Science is not in itself a moral narrative that provides the kind of values Ditchkins wishes to promote. It is more ambiguous and less ambitious than that.

This leads to the third chapter: “Faith and Reason.” Here, Eagleton does an excellent job of demonstrating how the notion of reason is itself not a given but has a variety of meanings and has been understood differently throughout history. This chapter is a fine example of what happens when someone with a good grasp of philosophy takes on two men who have strayed into territory in which they are less than competent and yet whose self-confidence leaves them oblivious to their vulnerability.

Finally, Eagleton closes the book with a chapter titled “Culture and Barbarism.” Amid the argument here, there is an almost elegiac quality: as he

“MODERN WESTERN LIBERALISM USES THE RHETORIC OF PROGRESS AND FREEDOM BUT HAS OFTEN FAILED TO DELIVER ON EITHER AND, INDEED, HAS AS MUCH BLOOD ON ITS HANDS AS ANY RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT.” surveys the political impotence that postmodern relativism fosters, he clearly longs for the grand narratives (and thus values) that religion provides.

He sees this as dangerous, for he knows that much religion does not embody the kind of social ethic for which he longs; but he sees an affinity of spirit between himself and those who are feeling the pressure of a society where cash is the only ultimate determiner of value.

In closing, he contrasts himself with Ditchkins by saying that his opponents are liberal humanists while he is a tragic humanist. We might recast this as saying that they are optimistic about human nature while he is pessimistic. Indeed, I was left with the impression that Eagleton knows that polite atheathe ism, à la Hitchens and Dawkins et al., is not an option. Yet, while his demolition of Ditchkins is comcom pelling, his attempt to salvage an alternative is ultimately unconvincing. True atheism must be that of Nietzsche’s Madman, facing the cold, impersonal brutality of a godless universe where all that is left is the will to power. Eagleton does not like that scenario at all. But if he wants tragedy, then he needs meaning; and it is only the Bible, not the dialectical movement of capital, that can provide this.

Carl R. Trueman is the Paul Woolley Professor of Church History at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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BOOK REVIEWS

The Quest for the Trinity: The Doctrine of God in Scripture, History and Modernity

BY STEPHEN R. HOLMES InterVarsity Press, 2012 231 pages (paperback), $26.00

T

he doctrine of the Trinity is right at the core of the historic Christian faith. From the ancient creeds, medieval theologians and the Reformation confessions to current liturgies, sermons, and prayers, the doctrine of the Trinity is a precious truth of Christianity.

With The Quest for the Trinity, Stephen Holmes has given Christian scholars another helpful resource on the history of this doctrine.

However, this monograph isn’t simply a historical summary of Trinitarian doctrine; Holmes’s focus is much narrower.

In this book, Holmes argues “that the explosion of theological work claiming to recapture the doctrine of the Trinity that we have witnessed in recent decades in fact m i s u n d e rs t a n d s a n d distorts the traditional doctrine so badly that it is unrecognizable” (xv).

In other words, the main point of this book is to show that many modern discussions of the Trinity are a departure from the doctrine as defined and defended by the early church and upheld throughout the years. In The Quest for the Trinity,, Holmes does not intend to set out an exegetical case proving that the early church was right and the recent revisions are wrong.

Instead, he describes the doctrine historically and then compares and contrasts it to the recent discussions. Holmes does interact with some biblical texts, but the bulk of the work is devoted to

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summarizing, comparing, and contrasting different theologians’ studies of the Trinity.

The layout of the book is as follows. First, Holmes analyzes recent theologians’ works on the Trinity such as Karl Barth (neoorthodox), Karl Rahner (Roman Catholic), and John Zizioulas (Eastern Orthodox). Second, Holmes goes back to biblical sources, showing how the church fathers interpreted certain texts in a Trinitarian way. Third, the discussion turns more specifically and extensively to the church fathers, including Irenaeus, Origen, Athanasius, Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, and so forth.

Fourth, Holmes’s attention turns to the medieval theologians and their Trinitarian teaching. Some of those include Richard of St. Victor, Thomas Aquinas, and Anselm.

Fifth, there is a section on the post-Reformation antiTrinitarian movements such as Socinianism, rationalism, and deism.

Finally, Holmes gives more detail on the Trinitarian teaching(s) of foundational nineteenthcentury theologians such as G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and F. C. Baur.

There are two reasons why The Quest for the Trinity is a solid, but not groundbreaking, book.

First, even before reading it I agreed with Holmes’s main point. When I read the introduction I thought, “Well, of course!” I’ve read enough of Barth’s Church Dogmatics to know that his views on the Trinity are different from many who have gone before him. Though not in as much detail, other authors have made the same point that Holmes does in this book. For readers who identify with Reformation creeds and confessions, the book will be preaching to the choir.

“THE QUEST FOR THE TRINITY WILL CHALLENGE THOSE IN LIBERAL, NEOORTHODOX, OR PROGRESSIVE EVANGELICAL CIRCLES.” Second, Holmes’s summary of the church fathers and medieval theologians isn’t novel. Readers who have already read other historical theological summaries of the doctrine of the Trinity will perhaps think of Holmes’s work as a sort of review. The patristic and medieval parts of this book have been discussed in detail elsewhere, and readers who are well versed in these subjects have no doubt studied all this before.

The Quest for the Trinity, however, will challenge those in liberal, neoorthodox, or progressive evangelical circles. I’m sure there are many out there who would balk at the suggestion that Barth’s doctrine of the Trinity was a departure from the historic understanding of the Trinity. It also might be a good resource for those coming out of liberalism into more confessional Christianity. For a scholar who is struggling with a proper historical and biblical understanding of the Trinity, this book would be a great help. Academics who haven’t studied this facet of Christian doctrinal history might also appreciate Holmes’s contribution.

It has probably become evident by now that The Quest for the Trinity is a scholarly work for upper-level graduate studies, seminary studies, or doctoral studies. It isn’t really a book for laypeople.

I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who is not well read in theology and church history. Holmes meticulously covers a lot of ground—two thousand years of doctrinal history in two hundred pages! Some pastors, elders, or teachers might be interested in this book if they are looking for a rigorous historical summary of the doctrine of the Trinity. But others will avoid it because of its density and complexity.

In summary, The Quest for the Trinity is a positive contribution to Trinitarian theology. Overall,

the book was very technical and detailed, but helpful. Though it isn’t a popular resource, I do hope Holmes’s work is read and discussed in theological circles. Ultimately, I hope it leads more people to a deeper Christian understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity—a central truth of the faith.

Rev. Shane Lems is pastor of The United Reformed Church of Sunnyside in Washington.

A Song of Ice and Fire Series

BY GEORGE R. R. MARTIN Bantam, 2011 3,264 pages (paperback set), $35.96

G

eorge R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire is a captivating and harrowing work about human nature under stress dealing with ambition. In the unfinished seven-volume work (the first five books have been published), he chronicles the history of Westeros, a fictional, medieval land of magic and battle, peasants and nobles, and the lust for domination. The royal dynasty of Westeros, the Targaryen family, has been displaced by a rebellion, and the remaining noble families fight for wealth, power, and influence amid the instability of a fractious realm.

The traditional fantasy tropes all apply in Martin’s work: the disinherited, born-out-of-wedlock John Snow slowly becomes the hero of the story, the least becoming the chosen one, à la Frodo Baggins from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or King David from the Bible. The Targaryen family—who had won their dynasty long ago with dragons— musters power to reclaim their throne under the exiled Daenerys Targaryen, who has gratuitously found three dragons that hatched from fossilized eggs. With the birth of the dragons, magic begins to return to a desacralized world that hasn’t seen magic for hundreds of years. Ancient powers reawakening, unexpected heroes—the work fits well into the epic fantasy genre.

And yet Martin’s book differs from previous fantasy, especially from Tolkien, on one critical point. There is little notion of good vs. evil. All of the characters are irretrievably fallen, and it’s notable that the one virtuous character of the series is MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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BOOK REVIEWS

killed before the first book is over. The Christian description of the fall, of human sinfulness, colors all the inhabitants of Westeros. A Song of Ice and Fire enters the depths of human sinfulness, darker perhaps than even Calvin or Luther, as R. R. Martin has no notion of an imago Dei or its potential restoration.

Dissecting the plot mechanics is difficult, if not impossible, because the books dwell in a world of utter chaos. Think for a moment of the Old Testament’s stories of battle and intrigue, massacre, slavery, escape, deliverance, relapse.

But despite the surface-level chaos of these stories, everything is working toward a purpose: Pharaoh’s hardness of heart is bound up in the providential Exodus, the wandering in the desert with the establishment of a nation and, in the New Testament, the murder of the Messiah with the final atonement for sins. Over and over, God arranges the worst of human nature into a bright, beautiful arabesque of providence—hence Rahab’s and Bathsheba’s places in the ancestry of Jesus. But without the eyes of faith, the stories do not cohere as well; they are frequently stories of human failings and chaos.

A Song of Ice and Fire is an experiment in viewing the world with a robust acknowledgement of sinfulness but little possibility of redemption. Without any unifying, restorative purpose, human ambitions vie with each other in what the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described as a “war of all against all,” which is always rending afresh the fabric of Martin’s world.

Apart from just the families competing for power, two counselors of the king, named Varys and Littlefinger, orchestrate the events of Westeros from behind the scenes. While Varys, the king’s spymaster, claims to be working for “the good of the realm,” Littlefinger realizes that in Martin’s godless world ambition alone must reign. And so Littlefinger is an agent of chaos and subversion, and his speech in the book’s highly acclaimed HBO adaptation pithily expresses the essence of Westeros: Chaos isn’t a pit; chaos is a ladder. Many

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“A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE ENTERS THE DEPTHS OF HUMAN SINFULNESS, DARKER PERHAPS THAN EVEN CALVIN OR LUTHER, AS R. R. MARTIN HAS NO NOTION OF AN IMAGO DEI OR ITS POTENTIAL RESTORATION.” who try to climb it fail and never get to try again. The fall breaks them. And some are given a chance to climb, but they refuse.

They cling to the realm or the gods or love— illusions. Only the ladder is real. The climb is all there is.

So if Martin’s work is merely a world of unfettered libido dominandi, why read it? First, because he’s a master storyteller. The epic sweeps its readers away into a larger, encompassing story, and despite the potential for escapism, there’s perhaps something to be said for its massive vision.

But more important, Martin’s work itself does not so much stop at human sinfulness as it does take selfish ambition as its starting point, its assumption. From the bare, selfish immanence of the first book, it takes off into something greater as magic slowly, gradually, breaks in upon the petty politics of Westeros.

As noted, the two most cunning, controlling men of the series are the counselors Varys and Littlefinger. It’s significant that Littlefinger does not believe in the religions of Westeros (there are several vying for supremacy), while Varys hates

magic in all its forms. Both figures are ill at ease with the increase in magic and religion that occurs throughout the series, because they worship ambition and control.

Two worldviews are constantly warring in the first three books: the world of power and the world of virtue. To simplify a bit, the virtuous characters tend to die pretty quickly; they lack the worldliness and savvy to hold power for long (Job 21:7 makes a good comparison here).

But to complicate matters still further, there’s a force of cosmic retribution called the Others (“White Walkers” for TV viewers), slowly invading the world of Westeros from beyond a huge wall at the distant reaches of the land.

The worldly, influential power players are not willing to believe in creatures beyond their control; their selfishness blinds them to the threat of coming judgment. And so the world of ambition and political power is doomed to failure.

Unless, that is, they can be delivered despite their blindness by our protagonists John Snow and Daenerys Targaryen, two candidates for a prophesied “Prince Who was Promised” who will redeem the land and keep the forces of evil at bay. Sound familiar? And yet Martin doesn’t seem to be a Christian; he’s only writing what feels true to him, which incidentally tracks very well with certain Christian themes.

In all truthfulness, the series isn’t worth reading merely for the motifs it may share with the Bible.

Instead, it’s the story’s emotional resonances that make it worthwhile and first rate. The blindness of those preoccupied with themselves is both pitiable and reprehensible, and we feel revulsion and deep empathy with the curved-in-on-itself political landscape of Westeros. And perhaps we feel a laudable

quickening of the pulse with the advent of magic in the book—as T. S. Eliot says, a “trilling wire in the blood”—that feels judgment at the exposure of our ambitions as murky and petty, but also elation at the idea of a destiny or providence that holds all things together.

The ever-calcifying world of human ambition is constantly being broken open by surprise, by magic, things beyond the control of armies and intrigues.

And yet the advent of providence and prophecy is complicated by the fact that the series remains unfinished; there are so many threads to Martin’s story, that reaching a satisfying conclusion will likely be impossible. If we acknowledge a low anthropology and place limits on human agency, the question remains, what sort of providence is active in the world?

M a r t i n ’s s p i r i t u a l agnosticism may end up weakening his story. With indetermian ambiguous, indetermi nate view of the nature of providence, there’s no united purpose to the supernatural elements of the story, and prophecy degenerates into arbitrary fate. Whether the next two novels can provide a satisfactory conclusion depends on Martin’s own struggle with these questions as he completes the anyseries, most notably the question of what—if any thing—lies beyond the dead-end of human striving.

In its commentary on the merely human world, however, the series is both profound and immensely entertaining—especially for those who understand that while our own efforts often turn to chaos, the only ladder worth mentioning has been climbed already for us.

Will McDavid is a staff writer and editor for Mockingbird Ministries (www.mbird.com).

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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GEEK S QUAD

B AC K TO S C H O O L R E A D I N G

Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ

Timothy Keller, The Reason for God

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith

Greg Koukl, Tactics

STARTING OUT

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GOING TOO UNIVERSITY TY

GOING TOO DEBATEE RICHARD ICHARD DAWKINS

SHORT ON TIME

C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man

C. S. Lewis, Miracles

D. B. Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies

John F. Haught, God and the New Atheism: A Critical Response to Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens

R. C. Sproul, Defending Your Faith

Doug Powell, Holman Quicksource Guide to Christian Apologetics

J. Budziszewski, How to Stay Christian in College

K. Scott Oliphint, Reasons for Faith: Philosophy in the Service of Theology

Ravi Zacharias, Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith

MODERNREFORMATION.ORG

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B A C K PA G E

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