The Sordid Boon, part 3

** This is the final post of a three-part review of Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist.

In the second part of this review, I outlined Gay's approach to four American institutions that have been given a platform in the church. Many Christians, Gay argues, take these institutions for granted everyday; as such, they've been allowed the luxury of moving freely within the community of Christ (much to the detriment of the body).

I've also mentioned that this isn't a book of prescriptions; some readers might not like that—pointing out several problems without offering several solutions. But to do so would be improper anyway, for his project itself would potentially fall into the same trap he derides throughout—programmatic applications, which stifle creative responses to the various challenges we face by offering too many abstract prescriptions and, potentiallly, subsequent proscriptions (i.e., not thinking "outside the box"). He can (and does), however, provide tools with which we, the church, ought to use to combat the practical atheism among us. I alluded to one tool particularly in the first part of the review, namely, a theology of personhood. That is, to approach all of our relationships (with the world, people, and most importantly, God) in terms of “I–Thou” (as opposed to “I–it”). And, again, the only way there (Gay argues), is through the recapturing and reapplying of historic Trinitarian orthodoxy (see pp. 284–296).

So, what follows is an attempt to apply this theology of personhood, just for fun. I reiterate, this is my attempt. Disagree at your leisure.

If there is one thing that lends itself to promoting practical, or “functional,” atheism in our churches today, it is running a church like a business—with its (the administration’s) maintaining control the ultimate objective. This fails to treat people as real individuals, instead of members whose everyday needs are secondary to the status quo of the organization. This has the unintended consequence of relegating the living God to an afterthought, thus breeding a dead faith that shares no identity, no union with the person of Christ, and no reliance upon the empowering, and sometimes spontaneous, work of the Holy Spirit. Maybe this happens among classical Protestants because we have warped the doctrine of common grace so much so that it has become disassociated from the active, loving hand of God, and turned it into a wholly transcendent winding of the clock. When a church assumes control of its mission, and attempts to define itself in worldly terms (to get the ‘seekers’ there or whatever), it effectively eradicates the radical immanence of the Creator’s touch.

How can a church reverse or resist this plague? Churches need to revitalize the parish mentality, and that has ramifications as to how large it can become. If a good number of parishioners travel from the same area to a church many miles away, why not plant a fledgling congregation in their own neighborhood? Churches must recapture their confessions. It allows them to play within the grand playground of Christian orthodoxy, and confess as the bride of Christ that he is her head and that she serves him first in all things—and that means (among other things) loving neighbors unconditionally and actively outside of our cultic gatherings. Churches need to boldly proclaim the exclusivity of the gospel. Today, the self is worshiped coram Deo. But there is no other god before the Almighty. A much-needed re-assessment of natural human capabilities escapes the pulpit. Far too much trust is placed in our own work week after week in self-centered sermons. 

Toward the end of the book Gay provides four suggestions that provide a good starting point in resisting worldliness within the community (pp. 260ff): First, when the gospel falls on deaf ears, do not presumptuously think that the method of delivery should change. Rather, expect the challenge, since the modern world has become inoculated by the immanentization of Christian truth. Gay makes the important point that today does not parallel classical antiquity, and so we should not expect (or necessarily want!) to re-duplicate the church’s transformation of that particular culture (i.e., the holy Roman Empire). Second, we cannot and should not expect to resist the inherent atheism of modernity and culture through mere withdrawal. Third, our protests against modernity should be leveled against therapeutic sensibilities and the modern will-to-self definition (i.e., understood as Nietzsche's "will-to-power" in the worst sense). Fourth, our criticism and resistance to (post)modernity must be genuinely theological, quite possibly by returning again, as in those times throughout history when certain churchmen and women were set on reforming, to the careful study and respectful following of the central tradition of classical (Patristic) Christian exegesis. That is, we must make use of explicit Trinitarian theology.

For example, as I wrote in the comments section of the previous post, as Christians, we contemplate the biblical theology—not philosophy—of the Trinity and how the Three interact socially as the One and are informed, nay, enjoined to live a certain way on this earth—no matter what the personal cost. This reconciliatory way of life is itself a direct outflow of the reconciliation that God in Christ through his Spirit has affected for the entire cosmos—and we sinners who confess Jesus as the resurrected Lord along with it.

At the root of these suggestions comes a remedy that only arrives by the grace of God, the ultimate resistance fighter against functional atheism. In Gay’s own words, we “need a fundamentally new disposition of heart, a disposition able to direct our otherwise ‘natural’ abilities toward the works of love and holiness” (p. 270). But we cannot manage this renewal all by ourselves. “We must begin by confessing that we [are called] into a personal relation with each other and with God by God himself, and that our response to this call—which is itself a gift of grace—must be to surrender ourselves to God and to our neighbor in love” (p. 303). We further need to constantly remind ourselves that we need not look for more effective techniques, better education (though in some circles this might be an improvement), more information, or better theoretical constructions (p. 269). And finally, we must admit “that we are simply not able to work this change within our own hearts. …For our cultural prognosis to be truly Christian, then, top priority must always be given to the conversion of souls. There is simply no other way of overcoming our natural inabilities and of arriving at a true assessment of our situation before God” (p. 270). We have lost heart, no longer really believing that “God is willing, and perhaps even that he is able, to deliver us” (p. 313). Until we get our hearts back after thoughtlessly giving them away to the world, Christian hope is but an empty aspiration leaning on a lifeless arm.

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The Sordid Boon, part 2

** This is part two of three-part review of Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live as if God Doesn't Exist.

In the first four chapters, Gay outlines and analyzes a few modern American institutions that are, in the worst sense, worldly (i.e., that push us toward a practical atheism), and offers glimpses of a “theology of personhood” (mentioned in the first part of this review) at the end of each section before focusing on it directly in the last chapter of the book (he considers this theology, based as it is on social trinitarianism, to be a major antidote to the ills he describes throughout the book). Regarding these four American institutions, we must:

• place human aspirations (protecting and preserving lives) over and against those of immanent political-social change. Over the course of the last one hundred years, countless human lives have been sacrificed on the alter of abstract ideals (like “progress,” “social justice,” and “freedom”). In light of this, Christian hope ought to be a political virtue (pp. 73ff). Why? Such hope gives us a healthy skepticism toward an earthly kingdom when it grasps at lordship; it relativizes large-scale political-social aspirations and exposes their hollowness and precariousness. Christian hope frees Christians up to act hopefully in the world. “It enables us to act humbly and patiently, tackling visible injustices in the world around us” Gay writes, “without needing to be assured that our skill and our effort will somehow rid the world of injustice altogether” (p. 77).

• with respect to technology and science, “give an account of nature that does not deny the validity of scientific inquiry, and yet does not so stress the autonomy of the created order that it tempts us to believe that science can reveal the meaning of nature and of our own lives” (p. 126). We Christians must neither wholly disdain rational and empirical inquiry, nor must we assume that science can be used in an unbiased way. The paradox of “contingency” must be affirmed and proudly maintained in the face of rational-technical determinism. Creation is both independent of (contra pantheism) and utterly dependent on God (pp. 124–129; see also pp. 272–281). God is sure; all else is subject to change.

• reject the logic of the modern economy, which reduces all things to objects of monetary value, and rediscover the Protestant work ethic of vocation as “calling.” That is, whatsoever we do, do heartily, as to the Lord and not to man (Col. 3:23). It means acting “ethically and substantively within the system no matter how impractical we may occasionally appear in doing so” (p. 175). This is, in a sense, an invitation to take seriously the vocation to suffer—theologia crucis in action.

• in combating narcissism, or the “worldly self” (p. 181), leave-off the notion of ever being fully satisfied with both consumption and therapy (or any earthly kingdom/institution for that matter), and be filled with a Christian self-consciousness in which “love for God and neighbor is progressively realized and deepened” (p. 232). The need to rediscover the self before God (coram Deo) as opposed to the self simply submerged in mass society and culture has never been greater. Therapeutic consumption, like any other drug, requires more of us every time we use it, until our ravenous gluttony results in self-satisfaction at any cost. Instead of finding our identity in the glory of the lordship of Christ (ironically, through the shame of the cross), we settle for defining the self in terms of individual rights and needs.
  

The hope in summarizing Gay’s book up to this point has been to help inform us where practical atheism threatens the church and what must be done to resist it. This is not a book of prescriptive solutions; it is a book that provides (I believe) explicitly Christian tools with which we can resist the inherent atheism of (post)modernity. In the next and final part of this review, I'll briefly attempt to apply these tools.

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The Sordid Boon

Today begins a three-part review on Craig Gay's Way of the (Modern) World; or, Why It's Tempting to Live as if God Doesn't Exist. I first read this book about eight years ago.

We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

For this, for every thing, we are out of tune;

It moves us not.⎯Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

⎯William Wordsworth, 

The world is too much with us, ll. 4, 8–12.

Every four years, the American nation turns its deficient attention to presidential politics. The major news outlets, those purveyors of bite-sized and largely irrelevant bits of information, do of course turn their attention to such things at least one year earlier, while many, if not most, do everything possible to ignore it. Eventually, notice is taken sometime around the summer before election day, with hopes of getting it over quickly (we might as well sing along with Simon and Garfunkel, “Laugh about it; shout about it; when you’ve got to choose, any way you look at it you lose”).

But we the people, not least the church, must resist this temptation—not by succumbing to the droning slogans of political pundits and cable news networks but by becoming thoughtfully deliberate about our everyday, taken-for-granted actions (like paying attention—or not—to presidential politics). This principle holds true, of course, for all of life (worship, while quite distinct from life, maintains this principle too). The church ought to be a deliberate people—deliberate about what they read, what they watch, what they buy; in short, what they think, say and do.

The church’s history from the first century onward teems with stories of churchmen and women who have resisted the slithering wiles of the world to some degree. From Saint John’s opposition to the seceders, Justin Martyr’s defense against paganism’s pseudo-morality, Tertullian’s repudiation of Gnosticism, the seven great ecumenical councils’ affirmations of orthodox Christian doctrine, to Pope Gregory’s defense of a future, bodily resurrection, Aquinas’ opposition to Avveroist "relativists," the Reformation’s recovery of the graciously free gospel, and the modern-day struggle over the authority of both the Hebrew and apostolic canonical scriptures—all of these serve to remind us that the catholic church has never been afraid of a fight. Where, then, is the battle today? And once the battle lines are drawn, how ought the church resist the attack?

In 1951, H. Richard Niebuhr wrote a haunting sentence: “How often Fundamentalist attack on so-called liberalism—by which cultural Protestantism is meant—is itself an expression of a cultural loyalty, a number of Fundamentalist interests indicate” (p. 102). In other words, (social) liberals and (social) conservatives, religiously speaking, are two sides of the same coin (that coin being the “Christ of Culture,” in his terms). It has always been the task of thinking Christians in America, not least since Niebuhr's project, to respond deliberately to this dilemma. It’s simply not enough to think we are avoiding both extremes, for the very actions we take for granted everyday are what is in question. What do our actions say about us? When we resist worldliness, what do our resisting actions say about the presuppositions that inform them? 

Craig M. Gay, in The Way of the (Modern) World, or, Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn't Exist, offers a thought-provoking analysis of this situation by focusing on what lay beneath the surface of modern American society. He uncovers something dreadful. Gay shows time and again how the unmitigated embracing of modern institutions by the church has rendered the gospel implausible to its hearers, as faith and prayer are constantly eclipsed by practical efficacy of expertise and technique (p. 3). By exposing the atheistic elements inherent within American institutions such as politics, science and technology, modern economy, and our own collective personality—rampant narcissism—Gay shows how each of these are worldly by definition, anti-teleological by nature. Our disdain of purpose then leads us to incessantly strive to create meaning for ourselves through political aspirations, through uncritical obeisance to science and the unthinking consumption of technology, through the dehumanization of others for financial gain, and so forth. Creation is thereby seen as an object for us to control, an object that we use solely to create our own purpose and meaning. The world is reduced to a human construction alone that attempts to blot-out the sovereignty and lordship of the risen Christ. In short, this “practical atheism” inherent within modern culture asserts that humans do not need God, that he is “largely irrelevant to the real business of life” (p. 2). However, this “practical atheism” does not preclude religious understanding: rather, “it simply requires that the object of religious understanding be subject to more or less ‘natural’ regularities” (p. 7). That is, we want a religion we can control. By maintaining this merely human construction over reality, we not only render the existence of a Creator irrelevant, we neutralize “the possibility of having any real encounter with the living God” (p. 7), and it is this deliberate constriction that prevents us from seeing the plausibility of the gospel (understood most simply as Rom. 10:9: “If you acknowledge with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be rescued.”).

Simply put, Craig Gay’s book is for those willing to take a critical look at their own actions, how they relate to the church, and whether they reinforce or combat practical atheism. While Gay’s frightening exposure of the church’s thoughtless consumption of modern remedies could send the reader into a seemingly irreparable quandary, he honestly wrestles with the problem in order to offer a valid solution: a theology of personhood. That is, to approach all of our relationships (with the world, people, and most importantly, God) in terms of “I–Thou” (as opposed to “I–it”). The only way there, Gay argues, is through the recapturing and reapplying of historic Trinitarian orthodoxy (see pp. 284–296).

* Update: See Part 2 and Part 3 of this book review.

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